Bring Her Back
2025
Directors: Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt, Jonah Wren Phillips, and Sora Wong
I got to see an early screening of this film, and as part of this screening, I got to see a special intro from the twin directors Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, whose first feature film was a little horror gem called Talk To Me. Now that being said, I wasn’t prepared for what I experienced. Notice I didn’t say watched.
There’s been a lot of buzz about this movie for months now, with horror influencers and doom scrollers going on and on about it being something above and beyond in the genre. If you’ve watched enough horror, you hear that and you’re thinking, “yeah, right.”
It’s real. The directors explained the plot best. It’s the story of a visually-impaired girl and her brother being taken in by a foster mother who is a satanist.
The story that unfolded was next-level horror. Just throw out the horrorverse rule book on this one, okay? Everything you think you know about horror does you no good here. Piper and Andy suffer a traumatic loss and end up needing temporary foster care. In three months’ time, Andy will be an adult and able to seek guardianship of his sister. They are taken in by Laura, who, at first, seems a little kooky and unorthodox. But it only takes about ten minutes to see what she’s really about. Saying she’s invasive, manipulative, violent, and unrelenting is a complete understatement. She has another foster son, whom she calls Oliver, who is mute, only wears red shorts, and behaves like a feral animal. She keeps him locked in his room.
Andy and Piper hope for the best, but it’s immediately clear that Laura is mostly interested in Piper for a heartbreaking reason. What follows is an intense, heartbreaking, unflinchingly violent campaign to separate brother and sister. I’m not talking about your ordinary unrelenting villain like you’d find in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, It, or Nightmare on Elm Street. Those are happy memories. This villain, like Leatherface, is the worst type of monster – human. And as I watched Laura in action and poor Oliver go through his transformation while Andy tries to figure out what’s going on, I flinched, winced, held my breath, hid my eyes, did the whole-body spasm thing I do when someone rakes their nails down a chalkboard, cried, and yeah, I shrieked. We all did. It was a full house, and that group experience, for me, only added to my escalating sense of terror and dread.
As the movie barrelled towards the end like a mortally wounded beast, the horror somehow grew worse with despair and deep grief woven in with such poignance that I thought about it for days. I also want to mention that you can’t guess what’s going to happen. I predicted one small thing. That’s it. I’m very good at guessing movie plots and story arcs. I’m a writer. I had nothing here, no idea.
The cast here is extraordinary. I was familiar with Sally Hawkins from The Shape of Water, but the young cast was new to me. And they were incredible. The pacing was as relentless as Laura, with no lag, no reprieve. The directors mercilessly drag you through this nightmare, and you just live it. The gore/sfx? Take every bloody, violent moment from the entire Evil Dead franchise in one film, and it maybe comes close. Not even joking.
This is not for the faint of heart, and this isn’t a light-hearted warning. Themes are trauma, loss, child abuse (so much child abuse), manipulation, gaslighting, occult things, kidnapping, murder, sacrifice, underage drinking, and madness in its purest form.
It’s also one of the BEST horror films I’ve ever seen, and I don’t say that lightly either. Bring Her Back was a masterclass in horror filmmaking. Those of us who love horror films always go hoping for that magical film that really scares us, uneases us. The one that has you curling up in your seat like a kid hoping that’s not a monster under your bed. THAT FILM IS FINALLY HERE.
If you’re a horror fan, by all means go see it. If you’re squeamish, don’t say I didn’t warn you. This is a solid 10/10 for me. This is only the second feature film for the Philippou brothers, and I’m going to follow their careers with great interest. The runtime is just under two hours and it’s rated R (though how they managed to get this through with an R rating I have no idea). Read the warnings. Grapefruit.
Isabella Jordan