Ken
There’s a moment in the Phillipou brothers’ first feature-length production, Talk To Me, that made me emit a high-pitched keening and watch it through the slits between my fingers. In Bring Her Back, their excellent second film, I did this twice.
This is a worrying and exciting escalation.
Many years ago, I read a tweet from someone that used the vomit-inducing phrase “came out fully baked” to describe Quentin Tarantino’s perfectly formed debut, Reservoir Dogs. I find myself now having to use that same horrible phrasing to describe the Phillipou brothers, who - after a storied early career on social media with their RakkaRakka shorts - came out of the gate fully baked (butchering it with a mixed metaphor helps ease the pain.)
With Talk To Me and now with their second feature, they feel like they’ve been doing this for decades.
The solid script wraps a well-paced mystery around explorations of grief and trauma. Grainy footage of a horrific ritual gives us a hint of what might be to come in the opening sequence, but how we get there is something else altogether.
A visually impaired girl and her protective stepbrother are fostered by an eccentric woman who also looks after a creepy mute kid that likes to wander around worrying the house pets. Any further outline of the plot would spoil a perfectly paced experience. With sharp editing, a foreboding musical score and some inspired camerawork, the brothers have a confident style. It also helps that they are bloodthirsty filmmakers and know how to get under your skin.
At the heart of the story are the two young siblings, who are both brilliantly played despite having to scramble about under the shadow of a towering Sally Hawkins performance.
Hawkins plays a thoroughly modern horror villain, someone who manipulates and preys on the mental frailty of her victims. There’s always an undercurrent of sadness to her behaviour and we never feel like she’s truly evil. Hawkins plays Laura as a jittery mess, at once sinister and deeply scarred. It's an all timer horror performance and one of many reasons to watch Bring Her Back.
Gaz
There are bits of this film - a triumphant return to the horror genre for dual-Philippous Michael and Danny and which is a serious contender for my horror of the year - that made me go “nononono”; sometimes whilst I stared at unflinching acts of graphic violence and others in response to a character so deftly executed in their villainy I wanted them to fuck right off throughout. This particular performance gets under the skin as much as any of the brutality on show.
Following the success of 2022’s ‘Talk To Me’, the Philippous’ directorial debut which has plenty of its own brutality (and grotesque dog-snogging), this is no more light-hearted an affair. Things get very gruesome but it’s also a very sad film which focuses around the relationship of two step-siblings Andy and Pider (Billy Barratt and Sora Wong) who are forced into the foster system to live with their new ‘mother’ Laura (Sally Hawkins) and traumatised new ‘brother’ (Jonah Wren Phililps) after the untimely death of their father. Things are not as they appear in their new home and things quickly take a grisly and infuriating turn.
I don't think it's spoiling anything to let you in on the fact that at the centre of Bring Her Back is a plot about a botched resurrection (I mean, the title is a fairly big clue). Botched resurrections have almost become an oddly specific subgenre of late, kicking off with Liam Gavin’s Faustian, magickal horror A Dark Song (2016) and even more recently with Justin G Dyck's Anything For Jackson (2020) and Julia Max’s The Surrender (2025), the latter’s release directly influenced by A Dark Song as per our interview with Julia, here. After years of the same old possession tropes milking contortionism and spooky voices to their least-scary zenith, these films refresh the concept for hardened genre fans and a new generation craving unsettlement alike.
Like those other films in this burgeoning pantheon, Bring Her Back uses horror as a lens for grief and explores the extreme lengths someone in mourning might go to in order to ease the pain of loss and why someone might embrace the fantastical and irrational for the slightest bit of hope that just maybe, their loved one’s death is somehow not the end. Like many of my favourite horror films, it feels deeply personal and immensely relatable and may even prove a little cathartic to some.
If you're anything like me, go into this prepared to grit your teeth and shout at the screen. A lot.
Bring her Back is in UK cinemas now!
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