‘Bring Her Back’: A Bone-Chilling Horror Film About Grief

Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou are back with another bout of locally sourced terror in Bring Her Back, a profoundly confronting piece of horror that chills to the bone with a viscerally realised and emotional meditation on grief.

Before all the production logos are done, Bring Her Back is already subjecting you  to horrific imagery from glitchy VHS tapes. The opening moments of the film are disorienting and confronting, setting a starkly different tone from their smash-hit debut Talk to Me.

While that film is hardly a ray of sunshine, Bring Her Back makes it look like a picnic. Andy (Billy Barratt) and his partially blind half-sister Piper (Sora Wong) have just had their father die. Because they’re both underage, they’re taken in by a foster mother in Laura (Sally Hawkins), who lives in a remote house outside of Adelaide and is also grieving the death of her daughter, Cathy.

But as Andy and Piper soon discover as they share the house with her and a mysterious kid named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), Laura’s plans for Piper involve her unwilling participation in a ritual to resurrect Cathy no matter the cost.

An excellent feel-bad horror film

Bring Her Back is most ostensibly an exploration of grief from the Philippou brothers, and the extreme ways that it can affect people. While Andy harbours complicated feelings about his own father that he’s protected Piper from, Laura has been utterly consumed by the loss of her daughter.

As a result, it’s a tremendously upsetting film. The Philippous have been open about how their own grief shaped the film during production, which I suspect is what’s led to this deeply harrowing cinematic experience. It’s a better-directed film than Talk to Me too, with a stronger visual style and a clear desire to unsettle more than their debut.

Though it’s fantastically made, Bring Her Back is a thoroughly feel-bad horror film that has more in common with Hereditary than Final Destination, even if all three have a commonality in head trauma. It’s not a ‘fun’ film, but as a result of its rancid vibes, few recent horror experiences are so affecting as this.

Part of that is thanks to Sally Hawkins, who is absolutely fantastic as Laura. The Paddington star takes on a role unlike anything she’s ever done before, and she is enthralling as a mother sinking further into delirium over the chance to bring her daughter back, and her willingness to ruin other people’s lives to do so.

That grief completely overtakes her life, her inability to accept what’s happened to her daughter manifesting itself in her single-minded determination to complete what she’s set out to do. Hawkins is on her A-game throughout the film in a turn that’s both outright villainous and deeply sympathetic.

The cast of Bring Her Back are sensational

She’s not the only one putting up a great performance, though. Billy Barratt is really great as Andy, with much of the film’s first act hinging on his character’s feelings of personal grief and unease at his new living situation. I’d be remiss to not give props to Jonah Wren Phillips, who is mostly silent throughout the film but instrumental to the horror of the film. Some truly gnarly stuff happens to this kid, and he seems to be game every step of the way.

However, the young Sora Wong is the greatest find in Bring Her Back. A young actress from Sydney who’s partially blind like the character she plays, Wong is sensational as Piper in the absolute nightmare scenario she enters into. Wong is able to play each beat of the shifting character relationships she finds herself in the middle of in a way that feels sincere and often upsetting.

Bring Her Back can occasionally overbear in its writing and direction. Some of its in the third act has a tendency to overexplain, and the score is often deployed in a way that almost seems to suggest a lack of confidence in Sally Hawkins’ ability to be terrifying by herself, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

Yet these flaws hardly seem to matter as Bring Her Back immediately makes its mark as an Australian horror classic. It’s an excellent meditation on grief that shows real growth as directors for the Philippou twins in its horrifying commitment to its ideas. It’s a film that’ll possess you while watching and leave a mark long after the cinema lights come on – and sometimes, that’s what the best horror does.

★★★★

Bring Her Back is in cinemas now.