Bring Her Back
Spoiler alert, but all those warm fuzzy Paddington feelings you had towards Sally Hawkins are about to be drowned in the backyard pool and replaced with some sort of mute changeling. In Bring Her Back, Danny and Michael Philippou’s much anticipated three word title follow-up to their 2022 hit Talk To Me, Hawkins sheds her Nice Mum skin and emerges as an Other Mother with ritualistic tendencies and a penchant for blasting The Veronicas (we’ve all been there). It’s a supernatural horror film about grief, trauma and how not to deal with them. Blood will be spilled, limits will be tested and the Adelaide foster system will perhaps not recover from the bad PR.
Our protagonists are Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), step-siblings placed into foster care after their dad dies in slippery circumstances. Piper is visually impaired and having problems with some little bitches at school and Andy - who is three months away from turning 18 - is very much her safe space and guardian. Unfortunately, the law is a stickler for formalities and won’t grant Andy guardianship, so the pair are placed under the care of Laura (Hawkins), an eccentric woman who lives out in the middle of nowhere (aka Adelaide).
Laura’s got another foster child called Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) living with her but, being mute, he can’t speak to her parenting skills. It’s clear to the audience, however, that Laura is treating Oliver more like a vessel for something than a child, and her motives for Piper are likely ulterior. She shows overt favouritism towards Piper because she reminds her of her deceased daughter Cathy, who was also visually impaired, so Piper gets Cathy’s room and Andy gets the Harry Potter treatment. Oliver is locked in his room more often than not and with the behaviours he starts exhibiting, we start to understand why. The more time the kids spend in their temporary new home, the more unsettling things become, and the more questions I have.
Bring Her Back is an interesting and effective (if predictable) exploration of psychological abuse and manipulation of society’s most vulnerable, as well as the different ways that people respond to grief. Laura’s actions towards the kids under her care are appropriately disturbing and I love that the Philippou brothers are unafraid to tackle such unsavoury topics without holding back. There’s also a good amount of gore to please the bloodhounds and the effects are beautifully chewy and wince inducing.
Hawkins herself is unsurprisingly fabulous as Laura, a woman whose own painful past almost excuses the shit she gets up to. Her performance is obviously a departure from her more wholesome roles and the contrast definitely works, forcing the audience to rethink our trust not just in actors, but in other seemingly wholesome people just out there existing in society. What are they doing behind closed doors? How do you know they’re not watching a VHS of a sacrificial ritual and trying to replicate it at home?
Then there’s Jonah Wren Phillips’ knockout performance as Oliver, a child who says nothing with his words and yet everything with his incredibly expressive face. His is a role of immense physicality and presence and you always feel him, lingering in the background like the best horror children do until he’s uncomfortably close and using a kitchen knife as a rockmelon delivery implement. I’d be venturing into spoiler territory by saying much more, but his layered performance did manage to break my heart a little bit.
I also loved the film’s use of Australian music; hearing The Veronicas’ banger ‘Untouched’, Daddy Cool’s ‘Eagle Rock’ and Moving Pictures’ (or is it Shannon Noll’s?) ‘What About Me’ not just played but played LOUD really centres the story in its place and adds a layer of nostalgia to butter up the Australian audience before assaulting our eyes.
I only wish Bring Her Back was more of an assault. More Australian. More unique.
I was surprised by how much I liked Talk To Me; I really hadn’t heard all that much about it and I hadn’t watched anything RackaRacka put out on YouTube, so to receive a solidly made, properly scary Australian horror movie was a real treat. With Talk To Me, the Philippou brothers used the supernatural hand and the horror it brings forth as an allegory for teen experimentation left unchecked, smartly springboarding off genre conventions rather than being dragged down by them.
While I think it’s still a well-made horror film, Bring Her Back doesn’t quite have the same impact. There’s a fair amount of the ritual plot that goes unexplained, the English accents of some of the cast slip through and some loose ends are left abandoned, as if we’ve just run out of time for them. Despite the gore and effects, I didn’t find the film particularly scary; perhaps I’m too desensitised at this point but then, there were parts of Talk To Me that managed to carve out space in a mind ravaged by Martyrs and Salo and I Saw The Devil. Is lasting disturbance too much to ask for these days?
All in all, the fact that a standalone horror film like Bring Her Back is able to be made and distributed in cinemas with such strong backing is a hugely encouraging thing. Aussie horror is alive and well.
Verdict:
☆☆☆½
Bring Her Back is in cinemas now.
