BRING HER BACK: Review

Step brother and sister, Andy and Piper, are fostered out after the death of their father. Andy is a few months shy of being able to apply for guardianship of Piper so they need to lump this development. Laura, at first, seems a little quirky and try hard but she has nerves, too. When the pair venture out and see the third foster child, a little boy with a shaven head, on the floor of the empty pool, worrying the cat, the ick springs up in both of them. It's Ollie, muted by trauma. He gets locked in his room. Laura's offness only gets worse and there are troubling flashbacks or snippets from the most terryfing home movies ever made that give us the ick when we see her, too. You know all this and the film is only about ten minutes old. Bring Her Back is not about a breakneck horror coaster, it's about grind and dread.

The brothers Philippou chose to follow up their breakout hit Talk To Me with something that, while still in the horror genre, could scarcely differ more. Talk To Me was like a classic pop song with some added depth. You can rewatch it frequently and never tire of it. Bring Her Back plunges its hand deep into the viscera of some dark and ugly themes and keeps it there, foraging around. There is none of the humour of the debut but there is also none of the context that might provide it. What warmth there is is kept solely between Andy and Piper. When the bad fires up it keeps on burning.

There will inevitably be grumps from the horror community that this is yet another A24 grief allegory posing as horror cinema. Well, that is a central theme but the concern widens out toward an exploration of family trauma. We have already seen in a prologue that Laura has turned to the occult to recover her dead daughter. The trailer makes a lot more of this than the film does. The tale on the screen is about the unlovely weave of a woman's driven obsession and the urban Hansel and Gretel she has chosen toward that end.

Sally Hawkins gives us a Laura who is easy with her professional counselling skills, susceptible to off-rail whimsy to grasp at the trust of her charges and prone to resorting to some nasty gaslighting. If you know the actor, you'll know her versatility from the pained optimism of Happy Go Lucky to the challenged Elisa in The Shape of Water. Hawkins delivers a figure steadfast in her aim but protean in her constant sense of threat. Her Australian accent is as subdued as her character is in the company of officialdom but breaks into a kind of grinning mew when approaching intimacy, she is flint voiced mother and snarling housecat. This, and at no time does the performance feel pushed. 

The Philippous' naturalism in their casts' performances extends into this more subdued tale and proves essential. This extends to the turns of the younger cast, Sora Wong, Billy Barrett, and John Wren Phillips. This means that our empathy is called upon to deal with graphic pain which is plastered over the screen for its running time. That's a lot in a cinema ticket.

I hope I'm wrong about this but I can't see this attaining the same success as Talk To Me. Without the hooks of that one (the hand prop and ritual, the youth and the energy just in the trailer) we are left with a slowburning grind whose trailer-worthy moments of solid horror promise colour but whose deeper moments keep the pace down and the mood grim. You can like Talk To Me for the fun of it and watch it later for the depth. This one, not so. I think it's commitment to the darkness of the tale that demands fluctuations in empathy and outright revulsion will keep it from mass appeal. However, it also feels like it needed to be made. When you know that its makers turned down much bigger returns to make this disturbingly sincere film, you'll treasure every frame. But to do that, you'll have to want to sit in front of it. What can I say but please do?