From Australian twin filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou (Talk to Me), Bring Her Back follows brother and sister Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong). Piper is mostly blind (she can see shapes and colors) and Andy has taken care of her for as long as they can both remember.
When Andy and Piper’s father dies suddenly, they are adopted by a woman named Laura (Sally Hawkins). Laura has a mute son named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) and had a daughter who was also blind and is still grieving her death.
What begins as an awkward transition during tragedy becomes an abhorrent struggle for survival as Andy and Piper eventually uncover what Laura has planned for them.
Talk to Me was a riveting horror debut by the Philippou brothers/RackaRacka and had the benefit of being injected with the incredible concept of chasing the high that comes with being possessed. Bring Her Back is a bit more familiar as it deals with a woman attempting to bring her daughter back to life in the body of a similar vessel.
Cinematographer Aaron McLiskey and sound effects editors Lachlan Harris and Lee Yee deserve a ton of credit for making certain elements of Bring Her Back look and feel like someone with impaired vision is experiencing them.
Visually, the film often focuses on what’s taking place in the foreground while the background is blurry with just enough movement for the brain to piece together what’s occurring. When Piper and Andy are in Wendy’s (Sally-Anne Upton) office, the woman in charge of placing them in the foster care system, the first thing you see and hear are the bracelets on Wendy’s wrist as she types.
In the sequence when Andy is driving Piper to Laura’s house for the first time the visor is down during a sunny day. Andy notices that Piper can’t see or feel the warm color of the day and puts the visor up, which sees an immediate change in Piper’s behavior and body language.
Andy and Piper find their deceased father in the shower, which results in Andy having a traumatic response to showers throughout the rest of the film. During their father’s wake and every time Andy considers taking a shower, Andy has a panic attack. Andy breathes heavily and understandably looks shaken during these sequences, but it’s highlighted by the way the sounds of the world are muffled by his accelerating heartbeat.
The concept of the film is that the living situation with Laura is meant to only be a temporary thing. In three months, Andy will be old enough to apply to be Piper’s guardian. Laura, who has slowly been figuring out a way to bring her daughter back this whole time seemingly waiting for a blind girl to end up in the local foster system, meets the siblings with mind games the minute they walk in the door.
Like Talk to Me, Bring Her Back is jarring and relentless at times with unsettling moments going a step beyond what would be physically comfortable. Oliver’s moment in the kitchen with the knife is a solid example. The highlight of the film is Sally Hawkins's performance. Hawkins has never shied away from challenging films, but Bring Her Back is her first interaction with the genre and she delivers in every way imaginable.
Laura is a nasty character with one goal in mind and Hawkins's performance blurs the line between pure terror and actual empathy for her. While Laura downright murders people in Bring Her Back and commits all these heinous acts, she is still a mother who has never gotten over losing the person she cared about the most in this world. And part of you still feels sorry for her by the end of the film.
The juxtaposition of what Laura is presenting as a seemingly caring foster mother and the dark ritual she’s planning for Piper is somewhat disappointing. Knowing Laura’s intentions so early on in the film (it’s given away in the title and all of the marketing of the film) makes some of the slower moments in the film feel a bit longer than they should. How the film slowly reveals what’s going on with Oliver is a bit more satisfying.
There’s a palpable tension early on where Laura seems like she could either be a gypsy-like character that dabbles in some sort of dark arts or just has a weird infatuation with the dead but cares about the well-being of Andy and Piper. Riding that tension a little bit longer where the film could have felt like it could have gone either way may have had a better payoff. It feels like modern horror films, especially the ones from this year, give a peek behind the curtain too soon and you’re left riding this varying wave of monotony.
Bring Her Back is another mesmerizing effort from the Phillipou brothers with gnarly sequences that teeter on being fully gruesome. Sally Hawkins portrays a nurturing nightmare of a motherly figure to terrifying perfection.
