Bring Her Back: Trauma Horror at its Best

We’re seven years on from Hereditary, that harbinger of family trauma-based horror, and few are filling Ari Aster’s shoes like the Philippou brothers. Bring Her Back, directed by Danny and Michael Philippou and written by Bill Hinzman and Danny, finetunes the jumpscares and creeping atmosphere of their debut Talk to Me while offering a storyline that’s both more cogent and emotionally intuitive than its predecessor.

The kids getting traumatized this time around are step-siblings Andy and Piper, played adeptly by Billy Barratt and first-time actress Sora Wong. Their brother-sister dynamic is laid out right off the bat as Andy shields Piper, who’s visually impaired—she can only see indistinct shapes and shades of light—from getting bullied by a group of teen girls at their bus stop. When Andy and Piper get home from school that day, they find their father unresponsive on the bathroom floor, covered in his own vomit. Andy dissociates with a ringing in his ears as Piper tries mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, unable to see that her father has no signs of life, in a gut-punch of a scene.  

Philippou and Hinzman cut the kids absolutely zero breaks over the next 90 minutes. After pushing their caseworker to keep them together despite an incident of violence in Andy’s childhood, the siblings get placed with foster mom Laura (Sally Hawkins). Laura, a kooky hippie-type with an overbearing personality, seems well-intentioned and welcoming, but then there’s also Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips, another absurdly excellent child actor—there must be something in the water in Australia right now), her shaven-headed, mute foster child first shown on screen attempting to strangle a housecat in the empty backyard pool. She’s also immediately colder to Andy than to Piper, putting him up on a cot in the attic and letting him know she’ll be reporting his behavior to the caseworker in preparation of him seeking custody of Piper when he turns 18. 

Those red flags keep piling up as weirder aspects of Laura’s personality arise. Sally Hawkins is simply riveting in the role; whether she’s persuading Andy to kiss his father’s corpse on the lips at the funeral (“it’s tradition,” she says, before kissing the corpse herself), or dancing joyfully in the rain with Piper, or preparing for an ominous ritual in the middle of the night, she adds a level of discomfort and complexity to her character that elevates the plot. As Andy and Piper, Barratt and Wong bring a lived-in sense of familiarity and closeness that sells their sibling relationship. And Phillips embodies his role as a demented little freak gnawing on knives and wood tables, banging his head on glass windows until they break, or just staring eerily in the background. 

It’s a testament to the writers that Laura and Ollie become humanized beyond their freakish antics as their backstories get revealed. The ritual at the heart of the movie is never fully explained, only shown through effective snippets of grainy VHS recordings. Similarly, Philippou and Hinzman maintain a psychologically tense atmosphere by doling out the gore and the scares sparingly, keeping the focus on the characters and the unfolding story of grief. Like in Talk to Me, most of that gore is done through practical effects, makeup, and prosthetics, and it looks levels above what other scary movies are putting on screen now.

In a post-movie Q&A, the Philippou brothers shared that they started working on Bring Her Back after witnessing their cousin’s grief—and the grief of the whole family—after the loss of her two-year-old. The care they take dealing with the trauma and death in Bring Her Back, and the layered characters they introduce, make the movie a new standard-bearer in modern horror.

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