MOVIE REVIEW – Danny and Michael Philippou’s second feature is frightening not because strange things happen inside an isolated house, but because it understands how exposed a person becomes when family is gone, certainty has collapsed, and the one adult who is supposed to offer protection begins patiently dismantling reality around them. Bring Her Back was already in cinemas last year, and I missed the press screening then; now that it recently arrived on HBO Max, I watched it at home on a projector, cast onto our wall coated with projector paint. The cinematic experience was absolutely there – perhaps even more so, because this suffocating, nasty, slow-burn horror had no popcorn rustle around it, only a dark room and the increasingly ugly certainty that you would not want to cross this house’s front door either.

The Philippou brothers already showed in Talk to Me that they understand the inner logic of teenagers making terrible decisions. Their characters do not touch the wrong thing because a horror screenplay needs another twenty minutes. They do it because they are young, impulsive, frightened, eager to prove themselves, and still convinced that a dangerous situation can be controlled with one cool gesture. Bring Her Back takes that observation somewhere far darker: the children here are not in danger because of their own stupidity, but because the adult world has already failed at every task that should have made them safe.

After the sudden death of their father, Andy and his stepsister Piper are placed with a foster mother. Andy is seventeen, technically close to adulthood, but still very much a child who has been forced to learn how to protect someone else too early. Piper is visually impaired, intelligent, open-hearted, and trying to make sense of a world that keeps changing without asking her permission. Andy does everything he can to keep her from feeling alone, while burying his own trauma, his father’s abuse, and the fact that he is far more frightened than he lets anyone see.

Laura, their new foster mother, is naturally not what she first appears to be. Sally Hawkins, however, does not merely play an evil caregiver. She turns kindness itself into a weapon. She smiles, makes tea, showers Piper with affection, and speaks to Andy as if every sentence were part of a carefully prepared case proving that he is dangerous, unstable, and ungrateful. That is what makes the film truly unpleasant. You do not have to wait for the supernatural material to arrive, because even before it does, the film makes clear how easily a traumatised child can be convinced that he is the problem.

The Children Are Not Stupid, They Have Nowhere to Run

Andy works because the film does not turn him into a spotless little martyr. Billy Barratt plays him as anxious, angry, occasionally reckless, and so desperate to keep control of his life that he can look threatening from the outside. But the Philippou brothers refuse to let the story simply stamp him as a troubled boy and move on. Andy seems dangerous because he has already learned that survival sometimes requires being loud, hard, and suspicious.

That is one of Bring Her Back’s sharpest ideas. His history, his outbursts, and his determination to protect Piper can all be read as aggression by people who do not know him. In reality, he is the one being repeatedly forced into the position of victim. Laura understands exactly how to exploit that. Hawkins makes her most unsettling not when she raises her voice, but when she understands the language of systems better than the children trapped inside them and knows precisely how to make a frightened teenager appear guilty.

Piper’s story hurts differently. Sora Wong does not receive as straight a character arc as Andy, but her presence remains essential because Piper is not simply a vulnerable child the script moves around whenever danger needs a target. She senses when something is wrong. The problem is that the world around her keeps trying to explain away what she feels. Laura is especially cruel in how she exploits Piper’s wish to belong somewhere, to finally live with an adult who does not merely protect her but seems genuinely happy to have her there.

That is why the film’s bad decisions work. Andy does not make a mistake because the audience needs another horror scene. He makes it because he does not want to accept that Laura is not a rescuer but an enemy. Piper does not trust Laura because she is naive. She trusts her because it is far harder for a child to believe that an adult offering love is actually using that love for something else. That psychological accuracy is far more powerful than most jump-scare machinery.

Sally Hawkins Destroys Everything With a Smile

Sally Hawkins dominates the film so completely that, at times, the others barely have a chance beside her. That is not because anyone else is weak, but because Hawkins finds the exact point where a shattered grieving mother and a cold manipulator stop being separate people. Laura carries real pain, and that makes her more frightening, not more forgivable. She is not a cartoon witch who exists because a horror film needs an evil woman in a house. She is someone who has experienced loss so deeply and so selfishly that everyone around her has become an object.

She loves Piper in a way that is not really about Piper at all, but about what Piper can replace. With Andy, she does not even need open cruelty. She only has to create situations where he looks unstable from the outside, allow him to doubt himself, and remain one fraction kinder in public than she really is in private. Hawkins plays this like a former child counsellor who knows not only how children think, but exactly which sentence can trigger shame, fear, or guilt inside them.

Jonah Wren Phillips is equally disturbing as Oliver. At first glance, the silent boy seems to be a victim himself, and in some sense he is, but the film plays very effectively with the audience’s instinct to automatically protect a child. Oliver is vulnerable and frightening at the same time, and the Philippou brothers build some of the film’s filthiest moments from that contradiction. This is not a child-horror performance built around suddenly appearing in a doorway with black eyes. Oliver becomes unbearable gradually, because the question is always there: how much does he understand, what does he want, and how much of a child is he still allowed to be?

One of the film’s strongest choices is that it does not make the viewer’s emotional response easy. You cannot simply decide who deserves pity, who needs saving, and who should be avoided. There are clear moral lines, and Laura receives no absolution, but the film does not settle for pouring all of its darkness into one villainous adult. Grief, loss, and the abuse of power over children become different faces of the same rotting system.

The Ritual Is Only the Surface, Grief Is Much Dirtier

Bring Her Back does not remain a contained family nightmare. A white circle on the ground, old VHS recordings, rituals in an unfamiliar language, and a secret act moving toward something terrible are introduced slowly, one detail at a time. The film does not lay everything out in the first twenty minutes, and that makes the house feel less like a location than a trap gradually switching itself on. The real question is not whether something supernatural is happening. It is whether anything human remains inside it.

This slow reveal works most of the time, although the film occasionally enjoys knowing something the audience does not a little too much. Some withheld details build atmosphere; at other points, the story keeps its own rules in fog. Bring Her Back is not a perfectly engineered horror machine, and not every turn is as elegant as the construction suggests it should be. But the film is not powerful because of the exact mythology behind the ritual. It is powerful because every new piece of information makes what Laura has already done to the children feel filthier in retrospect.

That is where the film’s most unpleasant intelligence lies. The supernatural does not replace real trauma. It sits on top of it, thickens it, and makes it worse. Laura would still be monstrous without any strange tape, chalk circle, or occult ceremony around her. The ritual simply reveals that she has stopped thinking in human relationships and begun thinking in tools, substitutes, and bodies. The horror works not because something jumps at the screen, but because it shows what a person becomes when they no longer want to emerge from grief and instead try to drag everyone else inside it.

That makes the film harsher than it initially appears. It does not comfort the viewer with the idea that love will solve everything or that childhood innocence automatically protects someone from adult corruption. The Philippou brothers understand that children are not symbols. They are vulnerable people, and when a horror film puts them in genuine danger, that has weight. Bring Her Back is not subtle in every moment, but when it is cruel, it is not merely trying to hit the stomach. It is attacking the reflex that makes us believe the word family automatically means safety.

Jump Scares Are Not the Main Weapon

The Philippou brothers are still not building a conventional jump-scare factory. They know that a loud musical sting and a face suddenly appearing in a frame can work, but they also know where genuine discomfort begins. It begins when a character still hopes that a situation can be saved while the audience already sees there is no normal exit left. Andy and Piper’s scenes are often more tense than the film’s most visibly distorted horror moments for exactly that reason.

Watching it at home on a projector made that especially clear. The dark spaces of the house, the strange light, the empty corridors, and the uncertainty sitting on the actors’ faces became large enough on the projector-painted wall that this did not feel like a horror movie casually consumed on streaming. The cinematic experience was there because the film understands how to close the viewer inside a space. Not in a grand, blockbuster way, but in the way a bad dream closes a door on you: no enormous effect, just less and less air.

The sound design and score do not constantly push into the viewer’s ears either. They let silence, the house’s tiny noises, Oliver’s unsettling physical presence, and the moments when nobody says anything do the work. That suits the film because Bring Her Back is not a bright, bouncy horror amusement park. It is a situation getting steadily worse, one that you keep thinking might still be reversible until it is clearly far too late.

When the film wants to become disgusting, it does not hold back. There are several moments that will stay with people not necessarily because they are formally clever, but because the Philippou brothers know exactly how far to push an image before the viewer no longer wants to look at it again. This is not empty gore, even though the film occasionally enjoys being filthy. The body horror always connects back to the central terror: someone should be protected, but in the place where protection should exist, only hunger, manipulation, and violence remain.

This Horror Does Not Love, It Understands Love’s Corruption

Bring Her Back is not as cleanly elegant as Talk to Me, and its central idea is not quite as instantly sharp. In return, it goes deeper into grief, family damage, and the way an adult can use the language of care to isolate someone completely. That larger emotional ambition sometimes creates a messier film, because the ritual, family drama, and body horror do not always pull with identical force. But the unevenness belongs to the experience too. Everyone inside this house is trying to breathe in a place where oxygen ran out long ago.

Sally Hawkins carries the film, not by simply playing evil, but by allowing Laura to be almost pitiable at times. Billy Barratt is a strong counterpart, Sora Wong remains memorable even when the script does not always give Piper as much room as she deserves, and Jonah Wren Phillips brings such a physical unease to Oliver that every scene involving him feels dirtier, tighter, and much less safe. The performances make the movie’s emotional ugliness land harder than its supernatural explanations alone ever could.

Bring Her Back is ultimately not the year’s most precisely structured horror film, and not every part of it is as original as its opening half-hour suggests. But it has something very few genre films manage: it does not only make you afraid, it makes you hate what it is showing you. Not the demons, not the ritual, not the blood, but the adult world capable of destroying a child while repeating that it only wants to help.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-