Bring Her Back

The Geometry of Grief

If *Talk to Me* was a hand grenade thrown into a crowded party—explosive, chaotic, and social—Danny and Michael Philippou’s sophomore feature, *Bring Her Back*, is a scalpel. It is quieter, sharper, and cuts significantly deeper. Where their debut explored how we perform trauma for others, this film examines how we perform it for ourselves, locking us in soundproof rooms of our own making. It is a film that argues, with suffocating precision, that the most dangerous haunted house is a mother’s broken heart.



The narrative framework is deceptively traditional. Following the visceral, body-fluid-stained death of their father, siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) are shoveled into the machinery of the foster care system. They land on the doorstep of Laura (Sally Hawkins), a woman whose eccentricity initially reads as maternal warmth but quickly curdles into something reptilian. Piper is visually impaired, a detail the script handles not as a gimmick, but as a texture of vulnerability that Laura exploits with terrifying competence.

Visually, the Philippous have graduated from the kinetic, YouTube-bred energy of their debut to a more composed, stifling elegance. Cinematographer Aaron McLisky shoots Laura’s house not as a home, but as an aquarium—a place of glass, water, and distorted lines where the inhabitants are merely waiting to be fed or eaten. The recurring motif of water—the shower where the father dies, the pool where Laura’s daughter drowned—creates a damp, heavy atmosphere. You can practically smell the mildew of stagnant grief. One scene, involving a "test" of trust at a dinner table, utilizes a slow, agonizing zoom that transforms a simple meal into a gladiatorial arena. It is a masterclass in static tension, proving the directors don't need jump scares to stop your pulse.



But the film belongs entirely to Sally Hawkins. As Laura, she delivers a performance of atomic instability. In lesser hands, the "evil foster mother" is a caricature of Disney villainy. Hawkins, however, plays Laura as a woman vibrating with a love that has metastasized. She is not cruel because she hates these children; she is cruel because she views them as spare parts for the daughter she cannot let go of. Her gaslighting of Andy—pitting him against his sister, rewriting his memories—is far more terrifying than the supernatural ritual that eventually surfaces. The horror here isn't the ghost; it's the realization that Laura’s madness is a coherent, logical system to her.

The supernatural elements, when they arrive via grainy VHS tapes and body-horror rituals, almost feel like a relief compared to the psychological flaying of the first two acts. The Philippous occasionally struggle to marry the high-concept occultism with the grounded domestic drama, leading to a climax that feels slightly more mechanical than the organic terror preceding it. The creature effects are tactile and repulsive, invoking a Cronenbergian disgust, yet they lack the emotional devastation of watching Andy realize he is powerless against an adult who knows exactly how to manipulate the system.



*Bring Her Back* solidifies the Philippou brothers not just as horror stylists, but as chroniclers of the modern family in collapse. It is a bleak, humid film about the refusal to accept death, and the monstrous things we do when we try to reverse the irreversible. It doesn't ask us to scream; it asks us to hold our breath until we, too, are drowning.