Starring Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips

Directed by Danny and Michael Philippou

Causeway Films / Sony Pictures – in Cinemas now

After their father’s sudden death, Andy and his younger, visually impaired sister, Piper, are fostered to Laura – herself recently bereaved – but the siblings are soon to discover that Laura’s motives are somewhat less that benevolent.

The joy of cinematic horror is that while it might creep you out, make you jump, or even turn your stomach, ultimately there is something reassuring about it. There’s an adrenalin rush if the thrills hit their mark, but at the end, the lights come up and all is right with the world. At the artier end of the genre, horror can be thoughtful and even moving, albeit in an unsettling fashion. Either way, the one thing horror movies very rarely are is actually ‘horrific’.

I’ve been watching horror for over fifty years and I’m pretty inured to all the wig-out tricks directors can throw at me, so when I say that I spent a good deal of the Philippou twins’ latest movie, Bring Her Back, peeking through my fingers at the screen it’s because I wasn’t just unsettled, it was full-on disturbing, and I was, at quite a few moments, properly and hardcore horrified.

It wasn’t what I was expecting. Back in 2023, their debut movie, Talk to Me, had been my number one horror from that year. I had loved it because while it had profound things to say about grief, addiction and psychosis, it presented as traditional teen horror, using a reassuring genre template to take the audience on a far smarter journey.

There’s nothing at all reassuring about Bring Her Back. For genre references see Hansel and Gretel, coincidentally by another pair of brothers, by the name of Grimm. I’m not sure how consciously Danny and Michael Phillipou are making those connections, but here we have two orphaned siblings at the mercy of a malign older woman – one of the foundation stones of European horror.

Despite being set in contemporary Australia, Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) discover that not only has Laura (Sally Hawkins) recently lost her own child, but they are to share her house with another foster kid, an elective mute, Oliver (hauntingly portrayed by Jonah Wren Phillips) who, in another nod to the edgiest of European folklore, has the unsettling air of a feral changeling. It’s obvious from the get-go that he isn’t who Laura claims him to be, and indeed, in her malign quest (implicit from the movie’s title) her methodology has been obtained from a badly degraded VHS sourced somewhere in the darkest recesses of Eastern Europe.

The other foundations of Bring Her Back are rock solid too. Given that 12-year-old Piper is unable to see she is doubly vulnerable, totally reliant on older brother Andy to interpret the visual world. But that relies on trust – a trust that foster carer Laura is cunningly able to undermine. Indeed, the skill in how the script is plotted and the characters are crafted is that they all ‘need’ each other at a fundamental level, and those ‘needs’ are constantly in conflict. Piper needs her brother, but she also desperately needs a mother; Andy needs to protect his sister but he also needs a parent he can trust too; and Laura needs to come to terms with her own daughter’s death – but it is a need that has long since got completely out of control. As for little Oliver, well his needs are on a different level altogether.

It’s rare to see characters not just brilliantly drawn, but where the tension between the key players is as carefully crafted, so that the anticipation of those taut emotional ties snapping is as alarming as the moments of extreme, visceral gore.

However, at the heart of the film is Sally Hawkins’s extraordinary portrayal of foster carer Laura. This is a magnificent and complex creation. Hawkins pulls off a remarkable acting coup by refusing to let go of the reality – nor indeed the vulnerability – at the heart of this wickedest of wicked stepmothers. Every moment, even when she is at her most malign, is emotionally motivated, spun through with human frailty and loss. I’m not sure I can remember an actor achieving this in any other horror movie – at some point evil is always just reduced to its abstract – but Hawkins never allows this to happen and I would go as far as to say that this is her finest and most skilled performance. In an alternative universe which took horror seriously, this would be Oscar-worthy stuff. If there was an award for the most terrifying use of the word ‘please’ in a movie script, it would go to this film.

Plaudits too to the young cast – Billy Barratt, Sora Wong and the remarkable Jonah Wren Phillips – even if young Ms Wong doesn’t get quite as much to do as the story merits. If there’s another caveat, it’s that at its most hardcore, the gore, convincing though it is, earned though it is, pushes the audience away from the emotional core of the film rather than draw us into it. I found myself having to laugh, which is a safety response to remind oneself that ‘it’s only a film’. There might have been a way to retune those moments so that the audience didn’t feel the need to step away.

Verdict: Once again, it seems that the very best of screen horror is coming from the southern hemisphere. Bring Her Back is a genuinely frightening, a genuinely disturbing, 104 minutes in the dark. 9/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com