Bring Her Back (2025) review

Dir. Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

To say the filmmaking duo Danny and Michael Philippou came out nowhere isn’t entirely accurate. Before their low-key, midsummer chiller Talk to Me entered theaters in 2023, the Australian brothers were previously known almost exclusively for their eminently popular YouTube channel known as RackaRacka, where they specialized in short-form comedy-horror. They currently have a little under seven million subscribers. Perhaps here in the States, where the duo, as far as I could tell, were largely anonymous, we were taken aback by the then-late-twentysomethings’ natural ability to conjure up visually stunning horror with sound design liable to pierce any unassuming eardrums.

The Philippou brothers return with their sophomore feature, Bring Her Back, with a similar brand of confident filmmaking, deserved so; you won’t find them slumping here. Despite yet another crack at the overused themes of grief and trauma, the brothers (and writer Bill Hinzman, who penned the script alongside Danny) find sustainable emotional footing in a story rife with carnage and brutality. The amalgam of body horror and deep-seated pathos shouldn’t work as well as it does here, but it affords its small cast of characters room to emote, consequently giving their plight more substance than the average fright-fest.

In the opening minutes of Bring Her Back, a teenager named Andy (Billy Barratt) finds his father dead in the shower. He wants to raise his younger, mostly blind sister, Piper (Sora Wong), but he’s not 18, so the two are sent to live with Laura (Sally Hawkins). Immediately upon walking through the door, Laura takes a selfie with Piper and positions her head to block Andy’s face. She wanted Piper. She’ll tolerate Andy for now.

Laura’s daughter was partially blind, much like Piper, but she drowned in a terrible accident. Therein lies her fixation. Not only is Laura caring for Piper and Andy, she also has Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), a young, mute boy with an empty stare and aggressive tendencies. Even early on, Laura’s lack of interest in Andy isn’t readily apparent to him. She still comes to his room at night, and her counselor background encourages him to open up about his relationship with his father more than any given stranger would. Still, Laura is uncommonly odd, at one point imploring Andy to kiss his dead father on the lips at his funeral. Andy inadvertently sets himself up to be the perfect one to blame when increasingly strange occurrences start happening, to the point where even Piper becomes nervous of her alleged protector.

Bring Her Back effectively entraps the viewer in the horror of this situation. As if foster-care wasn’t bad enough, Andy and Piper’s maternal figure is deeply untrustworthy, obsessive, and insidiously pits the more vulnerable one against her nurturer, which invites violence into the home. Like in Talk to Me, supernatural forces are invited into the mix in ways not necessarily germane to the trauma angle the film looks to explore. When Laura starts proposing the idea of ritual boundaries and assertions that a person’s spirit doesn’t leave the body for “months after their death,” Danny Philippou and Hizman’s careful craft of a story about the complicated nature of abuse found itself marginalized by such shoehorned elements. This is a story that’s chilling enough on its own merits, no demons necessary.

Sally Hawkins is such a wonderfully versatile performer, with talents that make her excel as a warming presence in family movies (Paddington) and more off-kilter dramas (The Shape of Water). Turning feral has yet to be a skill on her résumé, until Bring Her Back, which affords her the opportunity to be unhinged and completely unpredictable. Outside of the body horror, Hawkins’ unhinged performance is the gas to the film’s tank. She is a pained, grieving mother, whose lack of empathy for the children under her care is as apparent as her manipulation. Billy Barratt picks up the baton of emotional heavy-lifting, as he strikes these deep notes of care for his sibling, even when a psychopathic maternal figure is positioning him as the devil incarnate. Barratt, who is only 17-years-old, turns in a terrific performance, complemented by Sora Wong, with whom the two strike up believable sibling chemistry.

There’s reason to believe newcomer Jonah Wren Phillips, who is only 12-years-old, mind you, is the one doing the real heavy-lifting throughout. Phillips plays a mostly mute character, caked in pounds of makeup that does everything from make his ribs protrude to his stomach appear engorged from starvation. Phillips is also the centerpiece of some of the film’s most disgusting and viscerally disturbing sequences, such as when Oliver chews on a butcher knife, his teeth cracking and his gums slicing. A later scene has him gnawing at the edges of a table, again, his remaining teeth dislodging. Sidenote: I picked the wrong day to go to the dentist, which I did just two hours before settling into my showing. A broken watch has better timing than myself in this situation.

All and all, it’s nasty stuff. As great as the sound design is, yet again, in a Philippou brothers-helmed project, this time around, it’s a prepubescent child who deserves so much credit for making these unfathomable scenes as revolting as they are.

Bring Her Back ebbs and flows during its second act, but works to regain your interest when a social worker arrives at Laura’s abode to perform a “check-in” on Andy and Piper. Too often during the midsection of the movie does the innerworkings of cultist, demonic rituals come into play for a story that shouldn’t have to resort to supernatural qualities to be compelling. This is a sad horror movie, one that involves a teenager clinging to the last grasps of his sanity while his younger sister and him experience physical and psychological torture from someone who should be granting them a hedge of protection. Overutilized themes are tolerable when they stick to their guns, but the most frustrating aspect of Bring Her Back is its propensity to make the simple complex. If you weed out the fat, which isn’t particularly difficult to do, you’re left with a horror movie with an emotional consciousness, on top of a vulnerability, the likes of which is rare to find even in the current climate, which is diverse and plentiful in its offerings.

My review of Talk to Me (2023)

Starring: Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Sally Hawkins, Jonah Wren Phillips, Sally-Anne Upton, Stephen Phillips, and Mischa Heywood. Directed by: Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou.