With Bring Her Back Danny and Michael Philippou avoid a sophomore slump and deliver a new, more impactful horror movie reflection on grief.
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In 2022, directors Michael and Danny Philippou jumped onto the scene with a surprise hit: Talk to Me, a horror movie that featured a potent combination. Take the horror movie idea of talking to spirits beyond the mortal world and turn it into a party drug that dumb kids do at parties. The end result was a massive box office and critical success that's rare even in the horror genre. We're talking over $90 million gross on a $4 million budget and 91% critical approval on Rotten Tomatoes (as flawed as that system is). But there was always something that didn't sit right with me about the movie. Its take on grief.
I actually heard thoughts that mirrored my own conveyed by horror movie analyst Ryan Hollinger in his video on the film, that the film seems to lose its way by the end and portrays grief as something that completely consumes and destroys our protagonist. Which is certainly something grief can do, but always hits a bit stranger when your lead character is a kid and they almost kill one of their best friends.
Which brings me to the latest movie from the horror movie twins, Bring Her Back, a movie that examines similar themes with a stronger focus.
The Setup
The movie centers around step-siblings Andy and his partially sighted sister Piper, which great job guys for casting a visually impaired actor (it's not that hard), who come home to discover their father dead in the shower. Now put into foster care before Andy turns 18, the duo is sent to live with a former youth counselor named Laura who is fostering a young boy named Oliver and also suffered a tragedy of her own. Her daughter, Cathy, who was blind like Piper, accidentally drowned in the backyard pool. But as Andy and Piper attempt to settle in to their new reality, Oliver's disturbing behavior and Laura's unpredictability hint at something sinister beneath the surface.
Bring Her Back is about as on-the-nose as a horror movie can be about its themes and main idea. To the point that my wife Sharon jokingly said at the movie's end "is this about grief?" Because yes, yes it is. Much like Talk to Me, Bring Her Back is all about the complex reactions humans have to grief seen through the lens of our three leads: Andy, Piper and Laura.
Andy is a great place to start because Piper's grief is very straight-forward. At some point she lost her mom and now she lost her dad, so it's very sad, but she's also eager to potentially forge a new connection with Laura and hang on to the one she have with Andy. Whereas Andy doesn't seem to have the same affection for their father like Piper does, which shades his behavior and almost makes him vulnerable to the pokes and prods at his psyche from Laura. He's trying to so hard to collapse in on himself and bottle all of this hurt up, which means it bubbles up and makes him look bad.
Which Laura really needs because Andy is quickly catching onto something awful going on with Oliver (we'll come back to this quickly).
Meanwhile, Laura is an emotional roller coaster. I really like this portrayal of grief because I think a lot of people associate grief with single behaviors like emotional outbursts or depression versus the wide spectrum that occurs as someone copes or fails to cope with loss. And Laura indicates rather quickly that she has not coped with her loss in a healthy way. Sometimes she over-indulges in substances, her mood seems impossible to predict, and her secrecy around Oliver is suspicious. All of which is conveyed in perfectly ugly fashion from Sally Hawkins who tiptoes between semi-sympathetic and monstrous within single scenes.
There's a fair amount of overlap with Hereditary in that way, since we're dealing with grief reactions with a strong central performance from an Academy-Award level actor giving their all to the part.
It means that the emotional baseline for this household is already tense and then we introduce our horror element: whatever's going on with Oliver.
Everything Oliver does highlights the Philippou's knack for playing with familiar horror tropes, in this case a creepy child, and making it uniquely tense and terrifying. As an example, a lot of horror movies use creepy kids as a threat to our protagonists who either lurk or say creepy stuff right before something creepy happens that they may or may not have had a hand in. Whereas Oliver either behaves oddly or unpredictably inflicts pain on himself. Combine that with the visual "offness" of his red eyes and being mute, and you've got a catalyst that'll force everyone's demons out into the open.
I also thoroughly enjoy the usage of VHS tapes and aesthetic as almost a doorway to things that should be left in the past. The degraded VHS look does wonders with sporadic uses like this.
And as the tension in the house rises, Oliver's behavior gets more extreme and more bits and pieces about what's really going on are revealed. It's a powder keg that's just waiting to explode.
This is also why this movie works so much better for me than the last one because we had this wide range of experiences. Andy is trying his best to protect Piper, but is having trouble because he's also trying to keep some hard truths from her. Laura is completely overwhelmed and hiding her own secrets. And Piper is caught in the middle and literally and figuratively left in the dark as Laura frequently weaponizes her physical limitation against her. I also really like when the movie shoots things from Piper's perspective to highlight what she can or can't see. It adds additionally terrifying dimensions to later scenes.
So we've got a creepy movie that keeps ratcheting up the tension throughout the movie's runtime with a strong thematic/emotional focus that rings true, and great moments of visual flair. In other words, a horror movie slam dunk.
The Verdict: Terrifying
With a sharper focus that their previous effort, Danny and Michael Philippou avoid a sophomore slump and deliver a new, more impactful horror movie reflection on grief. 8/10
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