Danny and Michael Philippou | 1hr 39min
On paper, there is nothing explicably wrong with Andy and Piper’s new foster mother, Laura. Even when they first meet her, she greets them with a friendly smile, offering sympathy for their father’s recent passing as she welcomes them into her home. Everything might almost seem completely ordinary were it not for the strange, unsettling presence of Oliver – another young foster child whose vacant stare and eerie muteness suggest a deep disturbance beneath this household’s bubbly surface. The fact that Laura’s daughter Cathy tragically drowned in the pool shouldn’t necessarily be cause for alarm given the evidence of her sincere grief, yet as Bring Her Back draws stepsiblings Andy and Piper into her crushing embrace, it is that obsessive, unresolved heartache which rots the foundations of their new life.
After plunging into the realm of ritual occultism with Talk to Me, Danny and Michael Philippou continue to explore the twisted horror of necromancy and possession in their follow-up, capitalising on their tremendous indie success. The expanded budget is not explicitly revealed in the small-scale narrative, but rather through the exceptional casting of an Australian-accented Sally Hawkins, flipping her familiar, maternal warmth upside-down as Laura and distorting her face through refracted surfaces. Her apparent affection toward Andy and Piper is not so much an act as it is a memory of who she was before losing Cathy, anchoring this villain to her humanity, and masking a curdled, neurotic fixation on the barriers between life and death.
Manipulation and gaslighting are Laura’s psychological weapons of choice here, seeking to erode Piper’s trust in her big brother. Although she confronts Andy with private knowledge of old mistakes and intrusively pries into his text messages, she clearly holds even greater secrets close to her chest. In the darkness of her bedroom, this enigmatic caretaker watches bootleg VHS tapes sourced from Russia, where grotesque, arcane rituals flicker through layers of lo-fi static. By establishing these forbidden videos as a sinister motif, the Philippou brothers imbue the film with a demented mythology, foreshadowing the demonic depths that Laura will pursue to mend her broken heart.
For those familiar with Danny and Michael Philippou’s work, the self-mutilation that takes place in Bring Her Back should be no surprise, yet the gore is enough to make even the strongest stomachs churn. Next to Hawkins, child actor Jonah Wren Phillips leaves the strongest impression in the role of Oliver, his body degrading over the course of the film with bloodshot eyes, a bloated belly, and shattered teeth as he consumes all sorts of inedible objects. Whatever lives inside him, it possesses a ravenous appetite that not even Laura can control, culminating in one particularly harrowing scene where a knife finds its way into his mouth. Andy and Piper are evidently not the only ones far out of their depth – Laura’s entire existence is consumed by desperate delusion, struggling to maintain the illusion of normalcy amid uncanny, uncontrollable forces.
That Bring Her Back pours so much time into developing the siblings’ relationship too only makes the stakes that much more intimate. Even beyond the loss of their parents, the two have endured significant hardship in their short lives, carefully navigating Piper’s severe visual impairment while Andy conceals their late father’s abuse. The codeword “grapefruit” reveals the intricate depth of their bond, cryptically asking for complete openness while hiding its meaning from others present. It is a survival tactic of children who have grown up in unstable environments, and consequently safeguard an unconditional trust between them, thus making Laura’s attempts to undermine it particularly cruel.
The Philippou brothers refuse to sanitise the reality of child abuse for Andy and Piper here, depicting its full range from subtle exploitation to shocking physical assault. As a result, Bring Her Back also pushes beyond conventional horror boundaries in its assault of innocence, leaving our young characters mortally exposed. It is no coincidence after all that Laura chooses to take in a blind child with the same condition as her late daughter, effectively condemning Piper to a devastatingly similar fate. Through one particularly crafty match cut, the two are visually entwined, reinforcing the recurring pattern of surrogacy and death that underpins multiple relationships within the film.
For stepsiblings like Andy and Piper, securing family beyond one’s own bloodline may be the most powerful redemption they can find. Had Laura accepted these children as more than just vessels of her grief, perhaps she might have even found similar healing too. As it is though, obsessive attachment to that which has been irrecoverably lost blinds this human monster to the possibility of renewal, and ultimately surrenders Bring Her Back to the tragic despair of a corrupted, maternal love.
Bring Her Back is currently available to rent or purchase on Apple TV and Amazon Video.
