‘BRING HER BACK’ Is As Bleak As A24 “Prestige Horror” Comes

Australian writer-director twins Danny and Michael Philippou are quickly redefining a kind of no-holds-barred prestige horror filmmaking. With their sophomore feature Bring Her Back, absolutely nothing is off-limits. This bleak and deranged story of a brother and sister taken into the home of a foster mother, played by Sally Hawkins (who is most definitely not the kindly counselor the world believes her to be), lands among the most disturbing entries in the “elevated horror” genre, mostly by inflicting gruesome body horror upon children in ways that is as horrifying as is it narratively compelling. It’s a tough film to stomach, not just for its barbaric depictions of violence against kids, but for its thematic notes of child abuse and the grief of losing a child. Bring Her Back is horrifying in its premise, but it’s dramatically anchored by its mirrored narratives about families in grief: one side of the coin desperately trying to stay intact after a tragedy, the other willing to go to truly ungodly lengths to reconstruct what’s been taken.

The story centers on Piper (Sora Wong), a visually impaired Australian teen who refuses to let her disability define her, and her older stepbrother Andy (Billy Barratt), who tries to shield Piper from life’s harsher truths with a pair of metaphorical rose-colored glasses. That illusion shatters when they discover their father dead in the shower and the two are uprooted and placed in the care of foster mother Laura (Hawkins), who is very likely a Satanist. If not, her collection of grainy VHS tapes depicting brutal sacrificial murders certainly suggests a highly-questionable taste in entertainment.

Also living in Laura’s house is Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips), their new “brother” and the youngest of the trio. His shaved head and overnight muteness following the death of Laura’s daughter raises alarms. Any seasoned horror fan knows a mute child is the genre’s version of Chekhov’s gun, a blaring warning sign about the adult in charge. Danger! Danger! Laura greets Piper with warmth and a cozy bedroom while banishing Andy to a grimy room with a mattress on the floor and cropping him out of family photos. Andy hasn’t even spent a full night in Laura’s house before he’s allegedly peeing the bed, laying the breadcrumbs for a rather nasty reveal in a film brimming with gross gotchas.

The screenplay takes its time revealing what Laura is really up to, even if her maternal malevolence is fairly obvious from the start. Despite the basic framework of this story being somewhat easy to suss out through the tea leaves, what works consistently well is how the characters are built out and set in relation to one another. They are made of flesh and blood before they are torn to flesh and blood. Andy’s protectiveness toward Piper mirrors Laura’s obsessive grief over her dead daughter. So even amidst the horror — whether inflicted or endured — there is a disturbing thread of shared humanity the film keeps bringing back. And then there’s poor Ollie, whose despondency and detachment quickly transforms into a full-blown walking-talking red flag machine.

As with their debut film Talk to Me — which landed a spot on my Top Ten Movies of 2023 list — Bring Her Back balances the dramatic and horror elements with performances that are uniformly strong. Hawkins delivers a turn completely out of left field. Usually cast as warm and maternal, she uses that trust-evoking persona to set an emotional trap, snaring Piper, if not the audience. Barratt is the breakout sensation as Andy, navigating the emotional minefield of a character who is deeply traumatized, full of anger and resentment, but also unwaveringly committed to protecting his little sister. Whether physically shielding her or reframing traumatic events to preserve her innocence, Barratt handles the full emotional spectrum with maturity and grace, particularly for a performer under 18, becoming the bruised and beating heart of the film. Sora Wong, who is seeing impaired in real life, makes a strong impression as Piper in her feature debut, while Jonah Wren Phillips, in a nearly wordless performance as Ollie, creates an instantly iconic child-abonimation. His chilling presence is deeply unnerving, channeling a level of kiddo horror we haven’t seen from a pre-teen since The Exorcist.

The body horror sequences push the limit of decency, not just because they’re expertly executed, but because they’re inflicted on ten-year-olds. Their horrifying practical execution alone makes the material difficult to watch but when you add in the fact that it’s done to prepubescent children, it becomes almost unbearable. Some will argue that Bring Her Back crosses a line, ignoring horror’s unspoken rule that some things should remain unseen. But it never feels cheap or exploitative. Everything is grounded in something emotionally real. The horror done to children reflects a real world where horror is done to children. Accidents rip families apart, tear hearts from chests, and leave lives in ruins. Diagnoses send households into freefall. Random acts of violence from strangers alter the fabric of a family’s reality in ways they can never recover from. That is what we’re seeing here: horror born from grief so complete, so obliterating, that insanity and satanic worship feel no worse than the alternative — living with a loss so deep it could drown you.

Danny and Michael Philippou continue to mine that fertile intersection of trauma and horror, delivering the very particular flavor of genre filmmaking that the A24 prestige label all but guarantees. Bring Her Back is well-executed on nearly every front, with sharp direction, strong performances, evocative choreography and sound design, and a script that manages to balance genre thrills with full-on trauma porn. Yes, prestige horror may be edging into formula territory, not unlike the franchise junk that once drove the genre into the ground. But when it’s done well, it’s still spellbinding — even if the only way forward in seems to be making each one more disturbing, more traumatic, more emotionally pulverizing than the last, just to evoke the same reaction. It’s just not gonna leave you feeling very good.

CONCLUSION: Unrelentingly bleak in its exploration of grief’s demolishing power, ‘Bring Her Back’ unflinchingly depicts both emotional and physical violence toward children, along with some truly grotesque body horror. It goes without saying — this deeply feel-bad genre excursion is a challenging watch. But for unfazed genre fans, there’s real dramatic purpose roiling beneath the film’s horrific surface. Evil Sally Hawkins is a gift.