Oh, here we are again: the horrific, haunted heart of Australian genre cinema. With Bring Her Back, Danny and Michael Philippou (the twisted minds behind Talk to Me) trade punky possession for full-blown psychological rot, and the result is a thick, oppressive slow-burn that left me reeling. And gagging.
A Different Kind of Scary
Where Talk to Me made you jump, Bring Her Back makes you squirm. This is horror that crawls under your skin and sits there, damp and festering. It’s less about what’s hiding in the shadows and more about the gnawing grief that’s already inside us.
Sure, the bones of the story aren’t exactly revolutionary. We’ve seen echoes of this before. But what Bring Her Back lacks in narrative novelty, it makes up for in sheer, suffocating execution. Every scene is calibrated for discomfort. Every silence is a threat. It’s horror as a pressure cooker, slowly tightening the screws until you’re begging for release.
The story follows vision-impaired teen Piper (Sora Wong) and her older brother Andy (Billy Barratt), who are taken in by Laura (Sally Hawkins) after finding their father dead in the bathroom. Already traumatised and vulnerable, they’re placed in a home that’s quietly, queasily wrong. Also living there is Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who is mute, shaved-headed, and deeply unsettling. The kind of child you’d cross the street to avoid in a daylight horror dream.
Sally. Hawkins. My God.
Laura is one of the most chilling foster mothers to ever slink across a screen. Hawkins gives a performance that’s all quivering edges and unreadable stares, as if she’s trying to contain an ocean of grief behind her eyes. It’s desperately sad… and increasingly deranged.
The use of water is particularly unnerving: steamy showers, stagnant pools, condensation clinging to tiles. It’s like you can feel the moisture swelling in the walls of Laura’s mind. She’s drowning.
There’s one moment. You’ll know it when it hits. Involving a knife that despite expecting the worst, made me physically recoil. Ugh. Argh. Even thinking about it makes me shudder.
And then there’s the mystery that just sits with you, scratching at the inside of your skull. Where did Laura even find those VHS tapes? What was she seeing in them that we weren’t? How did she get “Oliver” out of that bedroom?
And don’t even get me started on ‘Untouched’ by The Veronicas. The second it blasted through the speakers mid-chaos, I left my body. That sugary 2000s banger now lives in my head as the soundtrack to psychological collapse. Never has a song felt so cursed. And I love it.
TL;DR:
- Sally Hawkins is unrecognisably brilliant. Oscar-worthy stuff (if horror wasn’t constantly snubbed)
- A grim, intimate horror film about grief, longing, and deeply cursed family dynamics
- Disturbing visuals that made me nauseous
- Like Talk to Me’s older, more broken sibling
- Expect body horror, long silences, and some of the most upsetting child acting you’ve ever seen
This is not a film for casual spook fans. Bring Her Back hurts. In a lingering, leech-like way. It’s harrowing, intimate, and far more emotionally brutal than you might expect from the Talk to Me boys. I left the cinema stunned, silent, and somewhat disturbed.
Stay unruly.
