Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips
Australian YouTubers turned filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou burst onto the scene a couple of years ago with their excellent feature debut Talk to Me. That movie simultaneously played like a throwback to the inventive American horrors of the '80s while also being notably Australian in how much relish it took in taking its narrative in disturbing directions. Their follow-up, Bring Her Back, is even more unsettling, but it's also more unfocussed. Its ideas are half-formed at best and half-baked at worst, leaving us to wonder if the brothers might have benefitted in taking more time between their debut and sophomore features.
Like Talk To Me, Bring Her Back is centred on youngsters in peril. When they find their father dead in the shower, 17-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and his visually impaired kid sister Piper (Sora Wong) are sent to live with a foster mother, Laura (Sally Hawkins). If Andy can keep out of trouble for three months until he turns 18, he might be granted guardianship of his vulnerable sister.
Laura's home is filled with red flags. It's surrounded by a suspicious chalk outline, and she keeps her now stuffed dog on permanent display in the kitchen. Laura was once a counsellor but quit following the death of her 12-year-old daughter Cathy. As the title suggests, Laura is determined to bring her daughter back from the dead.
How Laura intends to pull this off is one of the film's murkier aspects. She is seen watching VHS tapes of a disturbing ritual involving an obese naked man and a female victim having her faced chewed off by another woman. Laura has another foster child in her care, a young boy named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) who is suspiciously mute in the manner of the abducted kids from the Speak No Evil movies. Oliver seems to be some sort of human prop in whatever black magic Laura is intent on conjuring.
The specifics and logistics of Laura's ritual aren't especially important. Bring Her Back is essentially a twist on the old "psycho-biddy" sub-genre, and it has its roots in the many tales of evil stepmothers in folklore and fairy tales. Cast against type, Hawkins is terrifying as the batty Laura. Because she's played by Sally Hawkins, Laura knows how to use her maternal qualities to manipulate Piper and Andy, gaslighting the former into believing her brother is the real threat and the latter into thinking maybe he is going a little crazy. Like John Lithgow in the recent New Zealand horror The Rule of Jenny Pen, Laura fools Andy into believing he's wetting the bed by pouring her own urine onto his crotch as he sleeps - is this an Antipodean thing?
It's difficult to buy into Piper turning against her brother however. The opening scenes do such a great job of establishing the tight bond between these siblings, and Barratt and Wong have such a convincing chemistry, that it's just too hard to swallow Piper rejecting her brother for the suspect bosom of Laura. And if you don't buy into this aspect of the plot the whole narrative begins to come apart.
The Philippous are perhaps a little too reliant on shock tactics here, but the effects are so impressive that it's hard to complain about the grisly imagery we're presented with. A scene in which Oliver starts chewing on a kitchen knife is one of the most upsetting images in recent horror, and the effects will have you asking how it was pulled off. As a character, Oliver may be under-developed, and maybe even cynically deployed as a cheap way to manipulate the audience's fears (see also the use of Laura's cat, which seems marked for a grisly demise from the off), but young Phillips' performance is staggeringly good. Oliver's transformation from a young boy in peril to a monster that resembles the toothy kid-freak from Dario Argento's Phenomena is pulled off through a winning combination of convincing effects and Phillips' prodigious acting talents.
For all its impressive gore, it's the four central performances that hold Bring Her Back together. In their two films the Philippous have proven themselves gifted when it comes to directing young performers, but the quality of the acting here only makes it more frustrating that the characters and ideas are so thinly conceived.
Bring Her Back is in UK/ROI cinemas from August 1st.
