Maternal acts of love and sinister choices made in the desperation of grief are not mutually exclusive in Bring Her Back, Danny and Michael Philippou’s bleak-as-it-gets follow-up to 2022’s Talk to Me. Love and grief are presented in tandem, as parts of the same process, as a mother unravels from the loss of her daughter, and brings in foster children who will be subjected to the full pain of her loss.
Bring Her Back fundamentally works because of what Sally Hawkins brings to it. Her character of Laura is an unraveling ball of trauma. Hawkins plays against type and uses our expectations of her affable sincerity and likability to her advantage. She brings such nuance and control to the film, having detailed parts of the family home and her own costuming with personally chosen accoutrements. Hawkins is a remarkable actor and gives the film everything she has.
The story gets in the way, as the Philippou brothers try to do so many things at once. At each thing they are effectively successful, but the multifaceted demands of the script are a lot to keep up with.
Laura learned of a ritual to bring her daughter back by watching some occult VHS tapes. This is where things get convoluted: Laura will use her mute (other) foster son Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) to channel the spirits of an evil entity, who will then consume the dead body of her daughter, and regurgitate it into the mouth of her newly adopted, blind daughter Piper (Sora Wong), to bring back her first-born.
Let’s unpack this. Firstly, the shorthand of using a mute son to transmit this spirit to a blind daughter feels like a situation where the directors should have chosen a lane. Because they made the great choice of employing debut actor Sora Wong, who has limited sight in real life, the idea the young boy must then be mute begins to feel like a contrivance. The good news is, Jonah Wren Phillips gives such a haunting performance. In one scene, his character chews the hell out of a knife and it’s made so clever with excellent makeup and effects work. It has to work as a contrivance, of course, because if the son can speak and the daughter can see, it removes so much of what harm the movie still needs to inflict upon them.
This genre of maternal psychological breaks is always interesting, in what it says about parenthood, and the extremes of what we would go through for our children. Hawkins deep commitment to the material also makes her an immediate great in this mode of acting. But she can only hold the movie up for so long, before the amount of things on its mind make it hard for anything to really coalesce into a fully realized concept.
So, these new foster kids are in the system cause Laura has murdered him. He died in the shower, just as Laura’s daughter died in the rain, inside her pool. Two details of the movie give away the game: The pool is left drained now and a taxidermied dog sits proudly on the kitchen counter. The rest of the house likewise reflects Laura’s mental state, which simmers under the surface, clinging onto odd objects, accenting outfits with peculiar accessories, but most of all, Hawkins’ acting provides its own ornamentation.
That the film must process her tremendous loss of our daughter, alongside these kids who have lost their Dad, and are losing themselves in Laura’s misdirected love, leaves a web of tangled threads. The movie needs to be about something and you need to be able to express more clearly what that is. It’s always a few things and rarely one or two articles, but it does not get to fully render any of these story objects, because it’s always playing with a few threads at once.
Misery is not a problem in horror movies. We survived an entire era of vacant “torture porn” horror. The stuff that comes out and is miserable today, must have more on its mind. To Bring Her Back’s credit, it is not empty of intention and design, it has too much on its mind. But all you really need is what Hawkins is doing. If the movie could really trust and invest in that above all else, there’s something here. For now, it’s a heavy weighted horror blanket with some grisly stuff like a kid eating knives and some deeply traumatic generational processing as is the model of the day. We’re just so close to having something special. As a sophomore feature, it does solidify the directors’ work on Talk to Me and also shows their ability to work in concept, learned from making short videos online. Bring Her Back leaves us with a sense of foreboding heaviness but not quite any sense fulfillment. Let’s just remember Sally Hawkins as the year moves forward and everything she’s done for us.