Film review: Bring Her Back (2025)

Sally Hawkins in Bring Her Back

*Minor spoilers below.

Just the other week, I bemoaned the utter lack of feeling and originality in the new Fear Street: Prom Queen movie, a movie which felt like it was designed in some shoddy AI programme based on a handful of prompts by someone who merely watched the original movies. Thankfully, only two weeks later, a real horror movie arrives that not only made me feel something, it damn near broke my heart.

Danny and Michael Phillipou, the two larrikin Aussie YouTubers impressed the living shit out of me in 2023 with their debut feature Talk To Me, which I truly think is one of the best teen horror movies ever made. The Phillipous had their fingers on the pulse of today’s youth, or so it felt to me, and the characters lived and breathed on the screen, as opposed to being thinly drawn fodder for a masked killer like in the aforementioned Prom Queen.

Their sophomore film Bring Her Back is a somewhat different kettle of fish than Talk To Me, while also feeling of a part - it’s another keenly felt horror drama (more emphasis on the drama here) that examines grief and trauma through a horror lens and arguably does it much better than any of the other so called ‘grief horror’ films of the last 10 years, many of which also came from indie giant A24.

We follow 17-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and his visually impaired stepsister Piper (Sara Wong), who, after a shocking loss, are paired with foster parent Laura (Sally Hawkins), a nice but eccentric woman who lost her daughter to drowning. They discover she has another foster child in her care, the non-verbal Oliver, who is often kept locked in his room. Things quickly take a turn for the deeply uncomfortable, and before long, nasty, as Laura’s behaviour raises questions and Andy suspects she is trying to drive a wedge between him and Piper. It’s no spoiler to say that Laura seeks to resurrect her dead daughter Cathy, via some dark and twisted means that involve Piper.

Bring Her Back isn’t as immediately accessible as Talk To Me, with fewer characters and a dour, bleak tone that eschews the fizzing teenage energy of their first film, but it hits much harder emotionally by putting characters you genuinely care about through the ringer. Not going to lie, there is a character’s death here that choked me up and is one of the most upsetting things I’ve seen in a film for a long time. And as painful as that moment is, it doesn’t feel like it was done for shock value, it’s a genuine and necessary part of the story the Phillipou’s want to tell.

Just like Talk To Me, the performances here are outstanding. Sally Hawkins asks Toni Collette in Hereditary to hold her beer while she goes all in on a grieving, broken woman who will do anything to be reunited with her daughter. She is cringeworthy, terrifying, but, importantly, also sympathetic and thus much more interesting than your standard horror movie villain.

Barratt and Wong are the heart of the film—you desperately want their situation to improve and hope like hell that they can hold out the three months until Andy turns 18 and will be able to take guardianship of Piper. But this is a horror movie, and happy endings aren’t always guaranteed.

12-year-old Jonah Wren Phillips is also stunning, veering from mute young boy to cannibalistic ghoul with ease and still holding onto that beating heart of humanity that ensures you keep caring about him, despite the horrific things he does, both to himself and others. Most of the violence in the film is perpetrated by Oliver, and it is gnarly stuff, which made me push back in my cinema seat and wince on more than one occasion.

The Phillipous also bring back their penchant for slime and pus-encrusted ghouls — that and their threatening presence makes it feel like Bring Her Back and Talk To Me take place in the same universe, a world where we can commune with the dead, who have become restless and disturbed forces trapped in a nightmarish purgatory. Visually, the film paints the screen in cold blues and blood reds. The Phillipous use a lot of soft focus, mimicking Piper’s visual impairment. As such, the space of Laura’s house becomes illusive and untrustworthy. The white circle she has painted around her property becomes an important symbol in the film, a vital part of Laura’s plan. Water is also a dominant and sinister force, from the shower where Andy and Piper find their dead Dad to the swimming pool where Cathy drowned, and the torrential rain that fills the pool and seals another character’s fate.

I had originally planned to do a double feature with Final Destination: Bloodlines, but when the credits rolled on Bring Her Back, I didn’t want to diminish the raw aftertaste with some frivolous fun; that’s for another day. When something makes you feel this raw, it’s good to sit with it, much like grief in real life—you can’t ignore it or bury it. As much as I love a fun horror film, it’s good to get hurt every once in a while, and the Phillipous have quickly become experts at making horror that not only gets under your skin but peels it off your arm and then forces you to eat it.

4.5 out of 5.