Movie Review ~ Bring Her Back

Bring Her Back is structured like a fairy tale you’ve heard before: two vulnerable kids and a guardian whose sweetness curdles fast. It’s Hansel and Gretel with a modern upgrade—sorrow as the breadcrumb trail, a grieving woman whose affection feels more like surveillance than safety as the witch. Instead of candy, there’s VHS footage of cult rituals and taxidermy pets. Following their breakout hit Talk to Me in 2023, Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou have crafted a horror story that feels quieter but hits harder. Where their debut delivered supernatural heebie-jeebies with youthful energy, Bring Her Back doesn’t care about jump scares or crowd-pleasing finales; it burrows into domestic horror with unrelenting precision.

Teenage Andy (Billy Barratt, Blinded by the Light) and his visually impaired younger sister Piper (Sora Wong) are still reeling from their father’s death when they’re placed in the care of former social worker Laura (Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water), a fragile-looking woman with itchy-looking cardigans and a smile that lasts a beat too long. Laura’s blind child, Cathy, recently drowned in the backyard pool, so moving through grief is a process she’s intimately familiar with. Her secluded woodland home initially seems like a haven for the siblings to safely recover from their shocking loss, but Andy quickly senses something’s amiss. Laura’s foster son Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) is a selective mute whose disturbing dead-eye stare suggests that he’s… not okay.

Often known for an overly kind, sweetly demurring demeanor, Hawkins is terrifying in Bring Her Back. She leans into Laura’s maternal instincts with just enough sincerity to unnerve, giving her hospitality a humid, sticky quality. She shifts effortlessly between nurturing warmth and calculated cruelty, flipping her usual earnestness into something deeply unsettling. Laura’s years of working in social services have given her the tools to understand the defenselessness of grief-stricken children and she exploits the tumult of emotions Andy and Piper are experiencing without mercy. Shaking up the brother-sister bond has its purpose, though, because Laura needs Piper for reasons darker than mere manipulation.

Where Bring Her Back scores most strongly is its slow accumulation of unease. The Philippous know how to orchestrate this domestic nightmare with remarkable restraint, holding the tension just long enough before twisting the knife and unleashing truly shocking violence. The cinematography by Aaron McLisky uses blurred edges and oppressive close-ups to replicate Piper’s limited perspective, frequently locking us into a world where our scope is limited. Geoff Lamb’s editing cuts in fragmented flashes that never fully resolve, like a memory you’re not sure you ever had. It’s disorienting by design, and it works.

As a teenager carrying too much pain with too few tools, Barratt carries a significant chunk of the film on his young shoulders. Old enough to recognize danger but lacking the agency to escape it, he conveys with a stark edge that specific time in adolescence when you feel totally helpless. In her first acting role, Wong, as Piper, is the film’s moral compass, making her blindness a strength rather than a weakness to be exploited for cheap scares. Phillips’ Oliver barely speaks, but his enigmatic presence is feral and mysterious, and thanks to his involvement in the film’s most gut-churning moments, it is un-for-gettable.

The violence, when it arrives, is blunt and ugly. In much the same way that Talk to Me’s shell-shocking body horror seemed to explode when you least expected it, this is ghastly business that doesn’t flinch and offers little comfort. You survive it more than you watch it. There’s something here to test everyone’s mettle; even thinking about one gruesome sequence involving a large kitchen knife and teeth is enough to make my knees feel wobbly.

Yet the film’s most horrifying moments aren’t its bloodiest; they’re the manipulative betrayals of helpless children by those meant to protect them. Laura is what happens when mourning turns predatory. Her love has rotted into something parasitic and possessive. At its core, this is a story about how anguish warps people and can twist love into control, nurture into brutality, hollowing people out and transforming them into monsters. The parallel journeys of Laura and the siblings display the two sides of grief: as a wound that can either begin to heal or fester into something monstrous.

The film occasionally falls short before its haunting finale, with the screenplay from Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman introducing tangents it doesn’t fully explore and leaving some symbolic elements feeling more like strategized shocks than coherent storytelling. Alternating between nerve-jangling dissonance and eerie silence, Cornel Wilczek’s score throbs like an expiring heartbeat. Anna Cahill’s costumes cleverly mask Laura’s menace in soft textures while Vanessa Cerne’s production design makes the house look lived-in but never lived-with—a trap dressed up to look like a home.

This film sits firmly in the tradition of unflinching Australian horror (think a more idyllic Wolf Creek with satanists), refusing to soften its blows or offer easy resolutions. Bring Her Back isn’t “fun horror.” It’s not even entertaining in the traditional sense. It’s a 99-minute cold plunge into a sinkhole of psychological pain, mummified in cult trappings laced with nasty shocks. It’s home-bred horror with the volume turned all the way down until you realize you’re screaming inside. This delivers abundantly for genre fans seeking genuine emotional weight with their scares. Just don’t expect to leave with your spirit intact.