The Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou started off as YouTubers known for their comically violent shorts – Ronald McDonald Chicken Store Massacre (2014) has accrued 67 million views. They then raised the money to make their first feature. This was the quietly disquieting Talk To Me (2022), which cost $4.5 million and made $92 million. Bring Her Back (they like three-word imperatives, these lads) is their second and it may not be as successful.
It stars Sally Hawkins and this isn’t, alas, horror at its most fun, inventive and camp. This is horror horror: gory, grisly and one that properly goes for it at the end – which, if you are not a horror nut, can’t come soon enough. Even the horror nuts who loved it have been saying things like: ‘It’s the best film I will never watch again.’ I think I may regret seeing it the once.
It opens with grainy home-video footage of some occult ritual. A newborn baby lies within a chalk circle, while a dude with a weirdly distended stomach wanders around and a young woman is strung up. What the hell is going on here? All will be explained is the hope. Next we meet Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger stepsister Piper (Sora Wong), who is legally blind. Their father has just died and as Andy is three months off his 18th birthday he can’t yet assume guardianship of Piper, whom he adores. They are therefore dispatched to live with a foster mother, Laura, played by Hawkins. (One minute she’s Paddington’s lovely mum and the next she’s forcing a bereaved, traumatised child to kiss a corpse. It’s a rum old business, acting.)
Laura has another foster child, a boy, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who is electively mute and whose eyes sometimes go opaque – and I honestly can’t bear to go into what he likes to eat. He’s not a well lad, and let’s leave it there. One other thing: he will need dental attention come the end, and now we’ll definitely leave it there. Hawkins’s accent goes to Australia via the East End but she’s so deliciously and escalatingly menacing let’s not hold it against her.
Laura has another foster child, a boy – and I can’t bear to go into what he likes to eat. He’s not a well lad
Laura is warm, at first, in her hippy-dippy way, but the fact that she’s taxidermised her dead dog is a bit of a clue. And why exactly is there a chalk circle on her drive? She had a daughter the same age as Piper who drowned. She favours Piper and increasingly gaslights Andy while Oliver… we left it there, remember? The visual shocks come thick and fast. There are sights I part-saw through my hands or through the gauze of the T-shirt I pulled up over my head that I’ll never part-unsee.
The mounting anguish and tension is well handled as Laura’s plan becomes clearish. It’s obvious whom she longs to bring back, but is this the best way, Laura? Really? The chalk circles recur, as does that grainy footage, but no explanation is ever forthcoming. Who is that dude with the belly? The girl being strung up? I don’t want characters to sit at a table and launch into exposition as that would be trying, but at the same time I needed more. If I am going to be put through the mill, there had better be a good reason for it. I was waiting for a clever twist but it never came
The film is plainly about grief, and where it can send us. But it’s ultimately pretty simplistic. Still, the Philippou brothers know how to scare the bejesus out of you and the performances are all excellent, particularly Hawkins and Wren Phillips – from what I saw.
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