Director: Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou Screenplay: Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman Cast: Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips, Sally-Anne Upton Year: 2025
Twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou arrived at horror in 2023 with "Talk to Me," a low-budget debut that turned out to be one of the most jolting first films in Australian cinema in the last decade. When a first feature lands at that level, the immediate question is whether the director can repeat the hit. "Bring Her Back" is the answer, and it not only confirms that the Philippous are a serious horror voice, it deliberately pushes further: darker, more uncomfortable, more punishing than its predecessor. The film plants itself in the first minute in a register of unbearable grief, and what you see is what there is.
In "Bring Her Back" we follow Andy (Billy Barratt), a teenager who serves as guardian to his blind younger sister Piper (Sora Wong). When their father, long ill, dies in the shower, child services moves to place both siblings into foster care. The family would break if they went to separate homes, so they accept the offer of a woman named Laura (Sally Hawkins), who agrees to take them both. From the moment they enter the house it's clear Laura is only interested in Piper; Andy is tolerated, ignored, progressively pushed to the margins. Also living in the house is Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), a boy with disturbing behavior that Laura explains only vaguely, and the audience identifies him almost immediately as the other pole of the mystery: whatever is about to explode is going to start with him.
The first thing worth naming is the visual maturity with which the Philippous build "Bring Her Back." The sound design, the cutting, the way the camera lingers in specific moments: everything demonstrates a command of the rhythm of terror rarely found in a second feature. The sequence in which Andy tries to force information out of Oliver by offering him a piece of fruit is one of the most brutal scenes of the year: Oliver bites the fruit, then the knife Andy used to cut it, destroying his own mouth on camera without the cut giving the viewer any escape. The practical effect holds long enough to stop being a jump-scare and become torture. The Philippous understand that the viewer's discomfort isn't a side effect of horror; it's the material horror is made of.
The sub-genre "Bring Her Back" plants itself in is grief horror, specifically the grief of a mother who has lost her daughter and cannot accept the loss. The film operates in the same territory as "Pet Sematary" (bringing back the dead carries a price the one doing it isn't prepared to pay), "Hereditary" (the inheritance of family trauma as a supernatural force), and in a certain way "The Babadook" (another Australian mother in grief, another child carrying what the mother cannot put down). What distinguishes "Bring Her Back" is the surgical cruelty with which it distributes the damage: there isn't one central victim but three, each destroyed in a different way, and the aggregate forms a thesis about what unleashed grief does to the one suffering it and to everyone left standing nearby. And all of that emotional pain gets translated, in this film, into physical pain as well.
Sally Hawkins as Laura is the film's best casting decision. Hawkins is an actress associated mostly with warm roles ("The Shape of Water," "Happy-Go-Lucky"), and that prior association is exactly what the Philippous exploit. Her Laura is friendly, contained, almost maternal on the surface, and all of the character's horror comes from the collision between that facade and what sits behind it. On the child side, Jonah Wren Phillips as Oliver delivers one of the most physically demanding performances of the year: his body degrades at the pace of the film, and much of the horror runs through what the camera insists on showing of that degradation. One can only imagine what he had to go through to land some of those scenes.
The one reasonable complaint is that the film forces a couple of narrative gears: for example, how Laura gets the adoption approved too quickly after losing her own daughter, and how the later reveal that she worked inside the social services system softens the detail without fully resolving it. These are minor seams in a construction that in every other respect advances with implacable precision.
"Bring Her Back" is not a film to watch with someone who can't handle hard horror. There's no comic relief, no emotional exit doors, and the ending lands in a specific way, because it doesn't exaggerate to strike. Fans of the Philippous will find here the confirmation that "Talk to Me" wasn't a lucky one-off. Fans of grief horror, from "Pet Sematary" to "Hereditary" through "The Babadook," will recognize the lineage immediately. Those looking for a kind film, or one that respects their need to escape the discomfort, would do well to walk past this one. This is one of those films that gets under your skin.
Rating: 9/10
Ending Explained (Spoilers ahead)
The ritual Laura is trying to execute isn't a symbolic possession: it's a literal transfer of consciousness. The entity she has summoned is already inside Oliver's body (that's the degraded state we find him in), and the ritual's final step requires Oliver to physically consume the corpse of Laura's dead daughter and then transfer that load into Piper's body, so the daughter can "return" by inhabiting the girl. This logic also gives shape to Oliver's insatiable hunger across the film. His attempts to eat the knife, and later the table, aren't a symptom of possession but a call from the host body: the entity needs a body, and Oliver's is no longer enough. The most devastating perturbation of the ending is how much Laura knows and how clearly she has planned the sacrifice of Oliver, Piper, and anyone who crosses her path; she isn't a mother in delirium, she's a mother operating inside a closed internal logic where her daughter has to come back at the cost of everything else.
Andy doesn't survive. The sequence in which Laura runs over the social worker and then Andy with the car (in the rain, without the film giving the viewer any preamble) is probably the most depressing and unexpected point of the film. Andy survives the impact but is too wounded to escape, and Laura drowns him in the puddle that has formed on the street. It's a deliberately cruel narrative decision: Andy is the character the entire film has built as the protector, as the mechanism by which the injustice might still be stopped, and killing him closes the last door of hope. What remains is Piper, blind and alone, in the house of a woman who wants to erase her to install another in her place. The final shot returns to a detail planted at the start of the film: in an early scene after their father's death, Andy comforts Piper by telling her the plane sound in the distance is their dad going away. In the last seconds, Piper hears another plane taking off, and this time there's no one there to name for her who has just gone. The Philippous don't show us directly what becomes of her; they let the small ritual Andy taught her communicate to the viewer that she has also lost her brother. They chose the most difficult ending their story would allow them to choose, and they didn't blink showing it.
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