Review: Bring Her Back

If Talk to Me was the Philippou brothers flaying open the membrane between the living and the dead, Bring Her Back is the film where they dig through the entrails to see what’s festering underneath. Once again, the Australian siblings—Danny and Michael—plunge into horror rooted in loss, but where their debut flirted with the cathartic thrill of communion, this sophomore effort is pure resurrectionist rot: a moldy, maggoty meditation on grief so primal it bypasses metaphor and goes straight for the throat.

Bring Her Back begins in the key of mourning, but the dissonance ramps up quickly. Andy (Billy Barratt) is a teenager reeling from the death of his father and trying to cling to his stepsister, Piper (Sora Wong), who’s dealing with her own burdens—partial blindness and the alienation that comes with it. Their fragile sibling bond is soon tested by the state’s decision to place Piper with a new guardian: Laura (Sally Hawkins), a well-meaning former counselor with a politely clipped smile and something not-quite-right behind the eyes. Andy negotiates a temporary stay at Laura’s house, and so begins a slow descent into a domestic purgatory soaked in rainwater and repressed agony.

The house itself is a horror story in waiting. Laura’s biological daughter drowned in the backyard pool—now an empty, echoing cavity—and her mute foster son Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) skulks around like a bad omen made flesh. The film’s dread builds in drips and trickles, not jumps and jolts. The Philippous are patient, allowing warped rituals and disturbing details to emerge naturally: tufts of hair cut from corpses, mysterious locked sheds, and children force-fed mementos of the dead. By the time Andy wakes up in soiled sheets with no memory of how they got that way, you realize Bring Her Back isn’t building toward a scream—it’s already been screaming in silence from the first frame.

Sally Hawkins is the film’s diseased heartbeat. Laura is a marvel of contradictions: a woman grieving, mothering, grooming, and controlling in equal measure. Her performance never slips into caricature. Instead, Hawkins imbues Laura with the ache of someone trying to reclaim the unreclaimable, someone so undone by absence she’s willing to fill it with anything—flesh, hair, children, the past. In her hands, grief is a ravenous compulsion, not a condition to be treated. The film doesn't entirely sell sympathy for her even if it aims to but there is a clear understanding of what drives her madness.

If Talk to Me danced on the edges of its premise with visual flair and youthful energy, Bring Her Back is more subdued, soaked in watery blues and grays, with a texture that feels humid and close. The camera doesn’t so much frame as lurk, often keeping its distance as if to spare us the worst—before eventually plunging our heads beneath the surface. And there is a lot of surface: blood, spit, bile, rainwater, tears. Liquids are everywhere, seeping and staining. The world of Bring Her Back is literally drowning in unprocessed grief.

The film stumbles, briefly, in its final third—obliqueness becomes opacity, and one key narrative turn lands murkier then intended. But what’s missed in clarity is made up for in conviction. The final set piece rivals the best of Talk to Me in brutal, visceral horror, but it’s the emotional aftermath that lingers: not just what is lost, but what we become in the act of losing.

In the pantheon of grief horror—a genre fast becoming a reservoir for empty gestures and hollow metaphors—Bring Her Back does something rare. It doesn’t position loss as a puzzle to solve or a curse to break. It doesn’t cloak sorrow in allegory. Instead, it lets grief exist in all its repulsive, irrational glory. It lets it consume, and it asks: what would you do if you could bring someone back? How far would you go, and how much of yourself would you lose?

The Philippous have answered that question with a film that’s devastating not in its shocks, but in its truths. And those are the kinds of horror that really stick.

4/5