Bring Her Back (2025)

****/****
starring Billy Barratt, Sally Hawkins, Mischa Heywood, Jonah Wren Phillips
written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman
directed by Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou

by Walter Chaw Danny and Michael Philippou are on the vanguard of a new wave. It doesn’t have a name–or if it does, I don’t know what it is. But I would include as its finest practitioners Jane Schoenbrun, Kyle Edward Ball, Charlotte Wells, and Demian Rugna. Generally working in horror, their work is often confounding to me at first glance: I don’t always understand the source of their anxieties. They occupy a shared universe, however, with the same colour of sky, the same certain thickness of air that makes it tough to breathe while I’m in there. I have begun to suspect I might be the cause of it all, somehow–my generation, I mean, as it passes from middle age into decrepitude, skipped over for leadership by a gerontocracy that has proved itself incapable of standing against the fall of the American Empire. Is that it? Or is it the Internet? Or is everything connected? Is it the proverbial assault rifle we gave to the chimp, who is us? A deadly gizmo we shaved apes couldn’t begin to understand but could, and do, gleefully wield with deadly consequences? Bad enough, but then we gave it to our children, hooked them on it, made the world impossible without it, and told them to be afraid of it, yet didn’t tell them why. Because we didn’t know. I watch these movies and wonder if this is what Crowther saw when he watched Bonnie and Clyde and refused to recognize the bounty of crop his generation sowed.

Starting out making YouTube videos, the Philippous created a channel that eventually garnered 1.5 billion hits plus hundreds of thousands of comments and as much and more in sponsorships. I wonder what that does to someone. Did Spielberg receive that kind of attention as a television director? After Duel and The Sugarland Express? Even after Jaws, did he get the firehose of direct interaction with his audience that social media facilitates? When did he first feel the fear of being known? The Philippous’ feature debut was the brutal Talk to Me, which I felt largely inadequate to review because I am not equipped to contextualize how it made me feel: sad, bitter, guilt-stricken, and, what, frightened? Yes, but not of a cadaver’s hand that allows a spirit to possess whoever holds it. More like I was afraid of the metaphorical implications of the premise that holding hands with the dead allows the dead physical agency. How this speaks to the dead architects of our political catastrophe, to our failures in preventing climate calamity, to the resurrection of recent history’s greatest villains. Is this what all that zombie content was about? Is Talk to Me a continuation of the ideas proposed in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s cautionary Internet fable Pulse? It is similarly uncompromising about the victims it claims and especially cruel to the young and the lonesome. Talk to Me understands how the promise of connection can be an addiction, and it diagnoses the malady of our everyday as a sickness of the soul that only physical touch can heal. Our attempts to find a replacement for touch will ultimately be our downfall. Why didn’t we listen? What could we have done if we had?

The Philippous’ follow-up is Bring Her Back, and whatever misgivings I had about the rough edges of Talk to Me are mollified here. It’s a masterpiece. Titled with another plea for connection or, more particularly in this case, reconnection, Bring Her Back is about grief-stoned Laura (Sally Hawkins), who has explored the dark places seeking to assuage her grief over her daughter, lost to drowning in a now-drained backyard pool. Laura has recorded what she’s learned on a VHS camera and watches the abominations she’s captured on cassette on a constant loop, like a new widow soothing herself to sleep with home movies of her wedding in super8. The film opens, though, on two newly orphaned kids: strapping Andy (Billy Barratt), who is on the cusp of adulthood, and his young sister Piper (Sora Wong), who is vision-impaired but philosophical and wise about her difference. They’re placed in foster care with Laura, joining little, voiceless Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who has a penchant for escaping the house like Laura’s cat. Also like Laura’s cat, he’s content not to stray too far from the fenced-in, semi-remote property. Andy hopes to ride out the few months until his 18^th birthday, when he can take over guardianship of Piper. Laura hopes to bring her daughter back.

There is a moment in the first half of the film where Laura forces Andy to honour a funeral tradition he’s neither familiar with nor comfortable with, and it ruins him. He begs, she shames, he concedes; I had a jolt of recognition so pure it rocked me in my seat. It is such a specific reference that it becomes universal. When we buried my father, my mother forced us to go against every one of his wishes because of the demands of her cult. I hadn’t realized all the details I had suppressed until Bring Her Back. There’s a theory of interpersonal relationships called “tyranny of the weak,” in which a person forces her will upon others from an alleged position of meekness and good intentions. Laura is its embodiment. She is a nightmare, a Björk set to “evil”–impish, adorable, and, throughout the first half of Bring Her Back, dedicated to driving a wedge between Andy and Piper via a series of gaslights and microaggressions. She’s one of the great villains of modern cinema in that she is at once wholly sympathetic and never anything but a monster. The Philippous augment her state of mind with an oppressive, even onerous sound design that makes every soft thump of an insect butting against a locked window a grave reminder of how trapped everyone is. Watch how the kids fall into literal shadow whenever they’re in danger, whenever Piper’s world darkens towards sweet Andy. Watch how they emerge into light in their increasingly few moments of happiness or, in Oliver’s case, lucidity. The film could be noir for as evocative as it is sans dialogue. Watch, too, how the script respects its audience’s literacy in the absence of unnecessary exposition. Piper and Andy say “grapefruit” as a promise they’re telling the truth, or an amplification of the importance of something they’re saying, or an affirmation of the centrality of their relationship in each other’s lives. It means all of those things, but it’s never explained, because if you’ve loved someone for a lifetime, you already get it.

Bring Her Back is extraordinary filmmaking. It’s also extraordinarily cruel and unsparing, as gory as anything I’ve ever seen, albeit in an intimate way so that its grue never grows obnoxious enough to be camp. That most of the violence is focused on children only makes the film more lawless and, for many, likely unendurable. This film–these films (the I Saw the TV Glows and We’re All Going to the World’s Fairs, the Skinamarinks and When Evil Lurkses) all share an apprehension for the rituals of childhood and the traps and pitfalls set along the way by unknowable malignancies: terabyte faeries in a digital wood. Bring Her Back isn’t supposed to be endurable. It’s about an endless cycle of grief, thus the Philippous close everything inside a salt circle. It’s about different ways of seeing, thus it’s obsessed with translucence and transparence and eyes most of all. It’s about being trapped inside the house with the wolf-as-grandmother, but it’s worse outside. Most of all, it’s about how we’ve let our children down. We opened the wrong door. We took our eyes off the prize. We are living in Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child?, and their weapon of choice is these bitter exercises, these righteous rebukes for all the terrible things we’ve done.