Review: BRING HER BACK

 by Rob DiCristino

Growing pains.

YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou follow up their 2022 feature debut Talk To Me with Bring Her Back, a gruesome thriller that — stop me if you’ve heard this before — doubles as a gut-wrenching examination of grief and trauma. Yup. Grief and trauma. Again. We can’t blame the young directors for making art in the mode of their generation, of course, but with overeager horror influencers crowning every new release a masterpiece and every promising filmmaker an auteur, it does become necessary to occasionally stop and ask ourselves what virtue there could possibly be in this kind of exhaustive repetition. Bring Her Back is a well-crafted visual exercise with some chilling effects, for sure, but by drawing yet again from such a familiar thematic well, the Philippou brothers — known collectively online as RackaRacka — put more pressure on themselves to bring real narrative innovation to their sophomore effort. That Bring Her Back also fails in that regard makes it that much harder to excuse its reliance on these same old ideas.

Left without a home after the sudden death of their father, teenage step-siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) are placed in the care of Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former counselor whose own experience with loss should make them a fine match. Laura’s daughter died in a household accident — like Piper, she was partially-sighted — a tragedy she’s been coping with through what we’ll politely call “belligerent exuberance”: She’s pushy, in other words. She’s presumptuous. Loud. Nosy. She considers Andy’s privacy negotiable, and she seems committed to reshaping Piper in her late daughter’s image. The kids are understandably put off at first, but since they only plan to stay until Andy gains legal guardianship of his sister anyway, they figure it’s worth enduring Laura and her other foster child, a mute boy named Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips). She’s just lonely, after all, and there’s probably no reason to worry about the fact that she feeds Ollie human hair, pours urine on Andy while he sleeps, and stays up late watching Wiccan torture porn on VHS.

Or maybe there is. Maybe Laura’s obsession with bringing her daughter back from the dead has knocked loose whatever screws were still holding on after such an unimaginable loss, and maybe the idea of storing her child’s soul in the body of another until she can perfect the ritual that will let her live again doesn’t seem all that extreme if it means putting an end to such crippling desolation. Bring Her Back doesn’t bury the lede as far as Laura’s insanity goes, nor does Sally Hawkins’ manic performance leave any ambiguity about where that insanity will ultimately take her. That’s good news for Hawkins, who’s the clear highlight of a film that has little interest in answering questions about what Laura is doing — the directors compare their screenplay to The Shining in A24’s press notes, which explains their talent for writing impertinent characters — or developing a meaningful connection to Piper’s partial blindness or Andy’s visions of his father (Stephen Phillip). As in Talk to Me, the Philippous are simply throwing shocking images together and seeing what sticks.

Those images are pretty damn shocking, in fairness, which will go a long way toward boosting Bring Her Back’s opening weekend grosses and keeping the thirty-second clips in heavy rotation on TikTok. Jonah Wren Phillips should be commended for enduring what must have been hours of prosthetic work to transform Ollie from a merely-malnourished eight-year-old into a pregnant rage demon that feeds on barnyard animals. Again, Ollie’s purpose in Laura’s scheme is pretty murky, but watching the little guy gnaw through a butcher’s knife — and lose a few teeth in the process — is so outrageous that it’s hard to imagine too many audience members getting distracted by logistical questions. If nothing else, the Philippous know how to stage these goopier moments for maximum impact, with cinematographer Aaron McLiskey working in a few short-focus motifs that might have complimented Piper’s partial-sightedness had the film been interested in using that ailment as anything other than a way to stitch together a few plot contrivances.

So while Bring Her Back has a few meme-worthy moments on par with the bear suit from Midsommar and the telephone pole from Hereditary, it sorely lacks the substance of those movies, the connections between images and ideas that make the best genre films so eminently rewatchable. Ambiguity is not interchangeable with complexity, nor is “because trauma” a sufficient stand-in for a second screenplay draft. The Philippou brothers may well become great filmmakers in the future, but this sophomore effort exposes their limited understanding of what actually makes a horror movie scary. But you know what? It’s hard! Not everyone can do it! Not every filmmaker is John Carpenter, quick though modern journalists may be to anoint them so. It’s supposed to be difficult, and if the Philippous can get away from regurgitating the same A24-approved “elevated” conceits and come up with something coherent and captivating, then there’s no reason to believe that the stylish craft that serves them so well in Bring Her Back will help them make a good movie one day.

Bring Her Back hits U.S. theaters on Friday, May 30th.