'Bring Her Back' Review: An Unnerving Thrill Ride That You Can't Look Away From
The philippou brothers’ sophomore feature is equal parts emotional and horrific
Bring Her Back marks the sophomore feature outing for directors Danny and Michael Philippou, known as the duo RackaRacka, who first rose to prominence through their Youtube channel during the 2010’s. They emerged as filmmakers with 2022’s Talk To Me, a horror-thriller distributed by A24, which was a massively successful collaboration on both critical and commercial fronts. Bring Her Back similarly operates in the horror-thriller space, telling an original story about family, truth, and grief.
The story follows a pair of step-siblings, 17 year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and partially blind Piper (Sora Wong), who are sent by Australia’s foster care system to live with an eccentric woman named Laura (Sally Hawkins) after their father’s abrupt death. What ensues is, as marketed, a horror-thriller, but what shouldn’t go unnoticed is the strength of the film’s dramatic core. While working well as a horror thrill-ride, with demonic possession elements and genuinely morbid scenes, these elements work as well as they do because the film is able to build tangibility with its protagonists. The film starts as a drama for the most part, before gradually stepping both feet into the horror genre, so to speak. The brother-sister relationship at the film’s core feels lived-in and authentic, thanks to the film’s script allowing for there to be a deep bond but also a deep darkness, both of which are played on thematically to bolster the film.
When the film does make this plunge into horror, it hardly feels like a plunge, thanks to an unnerving Sally Hawkins, who puts everything into the Laura character. Sally Hawkins is an incredibly accomplished actress, who can play the cheerful persona so well, and excels at being likeable, take films like the superlative Happy Go Lucky and Paddington films for instance. In Bring Her Back, Hawkins is able to use that same likeable charm to lure the protagonists and audience alike into this experience, then subverting this in a commendable turn of darkness, both from a narrative and performance perspective. Hawkins’ performance is of such intensity and fortitude that it becomes hard to see the role working with another actress in the part.
As for the specifics of Bring Her Back’s more morbid elements, the less the said the better. It’s often said in reviews of many modern horror films that going in as blind as possible, and I think something like Bring Her Back is probably the best suited for such a phrase from 2025’s horror films so far. Bring Her Back, when reduced to a sole logline, would read as a mere possession horror film. What the Philippou brothers are able to inject into such a often-trite horror subgenre here is something of a dark miracle. Though this review has previously mentioned that the emotional core can be touching, make no mistake, this film is also sure not to pull its proverbial punches.
To straight-up call Bring Her Back a mean-spirited film would be disingenous, but it does contain some genuinely vile and disturbing imagery and actions, which coupled with the strong emotional stakes, make these horror elements all the more affecting. Yet, it’s hard to look away. The Philippou Brothers are careful not to delve into gore and mutilation for the pure sake of ‘shock value,’ and the film is not gratuitous with its use of the more horrific elements. These horrific set-pieces also work so well because of a script with many smart nuances and ‘rules,’ so to speak. The use of simple, everyday environments in relation to the demonic element at play help to further accentuate the precise tension the film is going for, as well as allowing for more tense character moments in tandem. While things like plot logistics are admittedly quite a baseless metric of a film’s strength or quality, it is nice to see a film like Bring Her Back take such care in the plotting of such a tense narrative, and implementing its own internal rules help to amplify the looming threats in the film.
Unsettling and emotionally effective all the same, Bring Her Back is a very solid horror-thriller, which has no shortage of stunning emotional beats and set-pieces, merging together into one of the year’s finest so far.