Danny and Michael Philippou’s 2022 Talk to Me had a simple concept and a refreshing ruthlessness which made it one of the best supernatural horror films of the last few years. The follow up, Bring Her Back is as unflinching as its predecessor—but the plot machinations and the supernatural rituals get lost in the filmmaker’s own labyrinthine high concept.
The film is about two siblings, 17-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger, blind step-sister Piper (Sora Wong.) The two discover their father dead in the shower from cancer and are put in the care of foster parent Laura (Sally Hawkins), who’s grieving her own deceased, blind daughter Cathy. Laura’s also watching a young mute boy named Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips.)
Except Ollie isn’t really Laura’s son, and Laura isn’t the perfect foster mother she appears at first. She has learned a demon-summoning ritual from a Russian VHS tape, and has an elaborate plan to bring her own daughter back from the dead, involving a restaging of Cathy’s drowning, the consumption of human flesh, and more nastiness.
Laura’s plans are bizarre—she gaslights Andy by dumping her own urine on his crotch while he sleep so he thinks he’s wetting himself. This gets a little much as the film goes along. But the real problem is that the movie is trying to be simultaneously a metaphor for grief and child abuse, and the multiple themes are at odds with each other in ways the script can’t resolve.
The grief’s embodied in Ollie, a (literal) demon of hunger and blood. He (mostly wordlessly) sneaks around the house, consuming inappropriate items—a knife, a wooden table, Laura’s arm—while occasionally imitating other’s voices. He’s a nightmare memory—hope and death and pain all squirming beneath his suppurating skin. Laura can’t escape him, not least because she’s created him. He’s the monster that torments her in the place of the child she has lost.
The child abuser is Laura herself. Ollie’s a ghost and a demon, but Laura is a more mundane monster, alternating between lies, emotional abuse, and physical violence. Though the film features lots of gore, blood and jump scares, the most disturbing scene is one at the funeral in which Laura insists that Andy kiss his dead father on the lips. He’s weeping and shivering, in part from grief, in part from anger, since we learn his father would sometimes beat him. But Laura pushes him and pushes him, manipulating his distress and his trauma for her own purposes. He’s physically bigger than her, and almost an adult. But even so, as a parent, she has power over him—because he’s looking to her for support, because she can undermine his efforts to become Piper’s guardian—and she uses that power to torment him.
An excellent horror film could be built on either of these ideas. When you put them together, though, they generate static rather than synergy. Laura’s grief serves as an excuse, or explanation for the child abuse. The movie plays with the idea that she’s motivated by sadism or a desire for control. In some sense she wants to own and shape Piper and deny her individuality and autonomy. But we’re supposed to believe that Laura acts out of love. This is unfortunate, since “we hurt you because we care” is the typical excuse for parental abuse, perpetrated by parents, foster parents, men, or women, against children of all ages, and often against disabled children.
I don’t think the Philippou brothers meant the film to echo these kinds of justifications. Instead, they had a lot of ideas and the plot and themes never gelled. There’s a lot to like. But watching Bring Her Back, you end up wanting to bring back Talk to Me.