Following up on their surprise hit Talk To Me, the Philippou brothers return with an exploration of extreme grief that often feels weighty in the wrong ways. Like their first effort, the main through-line of Bring Her Back is the desperation of the living to reconnect with the dead. In their new film, though, the Philippous ramp up both the extremity of the violence and the seriousness of the tone to present a horror that feels oppressive and heavy, often in ways that feel tacked-on where the underlying story and sentiment falls short.
Teenage Piper (Sora Wong) has a vision impairment which disallows her from seeing anything besides light and basic shapes. She is fiercely concerned with her perception and treatment from others due to this disability and refuses to use her cane so that she isn’t seen differently. Piper’s brother Andy (Billy Barratt) picks her up from school and brings her home where they find their father having collapsed in the shower in the film’s first shocking death, lingering on as Andy and Piper react to it in real time. Andy is not quite old enough to assume guardianship of Piper, so the siblings convince their social worker to place them both with a foster parent rather than split them up. The foster parent is Laura (Sally Hawkins), who has had trouble with foster kids before, but is willing to take both in to join her existing foster child Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips). Laura is immediately introduced as quirky, in a fun but sometimes off-putting way that Hawkins brings forth extremely competently, weaponizing her natural likeability in a performance that quickly becomes Bring Her Back’s centrepiece and biggest achievement. For his part, Ollie is mute and is feral in his behaviour and Laura keeps him under lock and key, ostensibly for both his and everyone else’s protection.
Laura’s pleasant-seeming if slightly kooky energy is put into new context when it’s revealed that her daughter Cathy, passed away in a drowning accident years ago. Cathy was also visually-impaired and it becomes clear that Laura has adopted Piper as a kind of surrogate. What Bring Her Back unravels, though, is how literal that actually is. A desperate Laura has been dabbling in black magic in an effort to resurrect Cathy, and this includes things like the giant white circle painted around her property, the storage of Cathy’s preserved body in the backyard shed, and the spooky VHS tape that outlines a ritual. This ritual is a simple three-step process: Mimic the death, consume the body, and transfer the soul. The video tape depicts these acts and promises that the end result is the reversal of that person’s death.
As Laura’s plan to use Piper to ‘mimic the death’ of Cathy and transfer Cathy’s soul into her body is revealed, so does it become clear that Laura doesn’t have a great understanding of the forces she’s playing with. Hawkins’ performance takes on a new tenor at this point, juggling multiple precarious and lethal elements at once, and starts to feel a little slapstick towards the end of the film, though. There’s a frantic late scene of Laura trying to cover her tracks, set against a jaunty score that gives it a humorous vibe, like a blood-soaked I Love Lucy scene. This is normally something that would tickle me, but it’s set against a backdrop of such misery and abject cruelty that it feels out of place even as an offsetting attempt at levity.
But without Hawkins, the characters of Piper, Andy, Ollie, and even Cathy feel shallow to me, and this is despite all of them being acted very well by their performers. The problem isn’t so much the actors as the writing, as Bring Her Back seems strangely underwritten. Even though Wong, Barratt, and Phillips are so clearly capable of making the most of this script, I never felt that Andy and Piper have much of an interior life or any interests beyond what we see onscreen. What little we do see, especially of Andy who hides his trauma (revealed somewhat late in the film almost as an afterthought to explain away some plot points and to clumsily connect his father’s abuse with his own behaviour) behind weightlifting and a certain amount of drinking, doesn’t come off as natural. The central conceit of the process to, you know, bring Cathy back is also pretty murky in it’s details and execution and suffers from that quirk of many horror and sci-fi films where so much is explained that when it falls short, you can’t help but see the holes. We never find out a single thing about the VHS tape on which Laura is fixated and which forms the logical core of the film. While this tape literally explains the step-by-step resurrection ritual, complete with text, it seems like even a throwaway line about where it came from or who made it would be included. Either more or less explanation, preferably in the form of a thicker sheen of mystery, would be welcome here.
In terms of atmosphere, the Phillipous often get things right with clever needle-drops on the soundtrack and with some inventive cinematography that makes the most of a sparse set of characters and, for the most part, a single set (albeit a compelling one, full of unique angles). Visually, Bring Her Back pulls no punches, or stabs, or especially bites with it’s genuinely stomach-turning practical effects and imagery that often had me, a sicko, averting my eyes from the screen. Combined with most of the violence in this film being both committed by and to children, and I can understand the early reception of the film as being ‘scariest of the year.’ The portrayal here seems to be a deliberate reaction and pivot from the more sparse, punctuated violence in the Phillipous’ debut effort Talk To Me by introducing violent scenes that are both more frequent and on which the focus lingers to really make you feel them, long after you’ve decided that you’ve had enough.
Ultimately, though, I came away from Bring Her Back wishing for a film that I know is buried deep within the one we actually have. As much as I love all the performances and much of the visual and aural composition of the Philippous’ sophomore effort, I find it to be unduly weighed down with a script that is both thick and thin in many of the wrong places. It takes a lot for me to bounce off a film with such compelling and memorable imagery and acting, but the relentless cruelty and the trite emptiness of the writing left me as cold as the corpse in the freezer.
Bring Her Back is currently in theatres from Danny and Michael Phillipou, A24, and Elevation Pictures.
