Bring Her Back (2025)
Actually on second thought, please don't!!
Using the horror as a conduit to access deeper emotion is in the very fiber of the genre. It breaks you down to your most vulnerable state and tears you open, leaving raw nerves exposed and more sensitive and attuned to the action playing out onscreen. Using KIDS as punching bags for spirits only makes it that more impactful and wrenching. Both of the Phillippou’s movies (Talk to Me and now Bring Her Back) center their stories around teens and young adults trying to navigate their way through a difficult time in their life — made exponentially harder by predatory demons and foster parent, respectively. What sets Bring Her Back apart from their debut is the integration of more mature themes and folding in an adult to play off the children.
***Spoilers***
Piper (Sora Wong), a visually impaired tween, and Andy (Billy Barratt), her protective older brother, come home to find their dad dead in the shower, leaving them in the care of the foster system, where Laura (played phenomenally by Sally Hawkins) chooses to take guardianship. Laura recently lost her own (also visually impaired) daughter in a drowning accident1 and takes a special interest in Piper, leaving Andy mostly out in the lurch with her other —supposed— foster child, Oli (Jonah Wren Phillips). Laura manipulates Andy and Piper, driving a wedge between the two and drawing Piper closer as a surrogate daughter. Laura goes to further and further lengths to in order to —as the title suggests— bring her daughter back to life using a ritual she studies through VHS tapes. This ritual is, mercifully, left vague, and the reason Oli acts like the creepiest kid on the block, gnawing on inanimate objects (I refuse to spoil one of the most gaze-averting moments of the year), staring into the middle distance, and just overall bad vibes. Andy figures out something is deeply wrong with Laura and Oli, but when he tries to warn the social workers, Laura manages to kill them both. Laura plans on using the demon that inhabits his body to resurrect her dead daughter by drowning Piper, but when Piper yells out “Mum”, it breaks her single-minded rampage and she releases her hold on the young girl.
In Bring Her Back, the Phillippou brothers took the most effective parts of Talk to Me and merged them with a story about the unimaginable grief of losing a child and how people can’t let go. The visceral imagery that they can conjure up is first-rate; half the audience let out audible groans, gasps, and nervous laughter when shit starts to really go down. The directors have quite the knack for getting a physical reaction from the crowd, and in a horror flick, that goes a long way. Even if some of the themes of “grief” seem well-trod, the execution puts this in a higher tier than most horror movies released in recent memory. The final act is heartbreaking, watching Laura push past the point of no return, refusing to accept the death of her child and actively letting evil win would be horrifying to watch even without the gruesome body horror that accompanies it.
Sidebar; It is completely irresponsible to have an open pool in your backyard if you have a young kid, especially if that kid is visually disabled?!? What could you possibly be thinking would happen?