‘Bring Her Back’ Review – The Feel Bad Horror Movie of the Year

Grief consumes directors Danny and Michael Philippou‘s follow-up feature, Bring Her Back. It fuels everything. The kind of primal, all-consuming agony that functions like a black hole, pulling everything nearby into its gravity and extinguishing light. The Philippous’ brand of grief horror is as visceral and brutal as you’d expect based on their feature debut Talk to Me, but without any of the vibrancy or hope. Instead, Bring Her Back operates on an unwavering and palpable feeling of dread and anguish from start to end.

The only truly carefree moment at all in the Philippous’ bleak sophomore effort comes with the opening scene that introduces protective older brother Andy (Billy Barratt) as he picks up his sister Piper (Sora Wong), who is blind, from the bus stop, mere moments after she tries and fails to make new friends. The tender moment between tight-knit siblings comes screeching to a halt when they arrive home to find dad dead in the shower, a traumatic moment that they barely have time to register before social services set about placing them in new homes.

They’re taken in by Laura (Sally Hawkins), an eccentric woman with a rather unusual child already in her care, the mute Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). It turns out that Laura is also acutely familiar with profound loss, and she has plans for her new wards.

Photo credit: Ingvar Kenne

If the setup isn’t enough of an indicator, Bring Her Back is a downer of the highest order with one cruel monster at the center. Despite some rather creepy occult tapes indicating what Laura intends to accomplish and a chilling performance by Jonah Wren Phillips as the eerie possessed child at her disposal, Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman‘s script keeps the horror mostly relegated to the background. That’s not to say it’s lacking or subdued — Oliver is one nasty poster child for body horror — but that most of the tension derives from Laura’s evil machinations in her determination to see her goal through. That involves a lot of gaslighting and abuse, driving an intentional wedge between Andy and Piper, made all the more heartbreaking and vicious considering that it’s all inflicted upon minors. 

As such, the film belongs to Sally Hawkins; Laura’s calculated cunning is as infuriating as it is compelling and unpredictable. Laura’s the type who knows how to deceive and turn on the charm, and how to utterly destroy a young soul still reeling from losing nearly their entire world. That Hawkins can also manage to induce sympathy for Laura’s own grief or nearly fall for her display of kindness speaks to her as a performer; the script withholds too much of Laura’s humanity until the late hour. By then, it’s far too little too late.

Part of that is owed to the incredibly heart wrenching performance by Barratt as a teen trying to hold it together during the lowest point of his life, but failing through no fault of his own. Most of it, though, is owed to the Philippous’ laser focus on situating their audience with oppressive dread at the expense of story and scares. As Andy opens up to Laura, for example, it introduces a subplot that’s clumsily handled to a manipulative degree. 

Photo credit: Ingvar Kenne

The true horror here is of the human variety, with the occult elements perfunctory and fleeting and in support of a woman so consumed by pain that she’s become a vile beast. Bring Her Back introduces her as such and struggles to expose her humanity, making for a more tonally flat effort than the Philippous’ debut. It’s a film that makes you sit with its anguish, piling on the trauma at a steady clip until it reaches a cheerless conclusion that refuses even a semblance of catharsis for the gauntlet of misery endured.

Bring Her Back is a more refined effort from the Philippous, but it’s also more restrictive and simple. It’s impressively bold and shocking in the way the directors continue to push horror boundaries and shatter taboos, especially when it comes to kids, ensuring a nail-biting and grueling experience that’ll leave you wincing and squirming in your seat. But it’s so utterly soul crushing in its unwavering darkness that it’s hard to imagine anything coming close to beating it for the mantle of feel bad horror of the year.

Bring Her Back releases in theaters on May 30, 2025.

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