Film Review - Bring Her Back (2025)

Bring Her Back is the new horror movie by the Philippou brothers who broke out with their debut feature film Talk to Me in 2023 and this one sees Andy (Billy Barratt) and his Sister Piper (Sora Wong) being placed into foster care after the death of their father courtesy of Laura (Sally Hawkins) who is mourning the death of her daughter Cathy after a drowning accident but Laura is now all that she seems.

Bring Her Back is a movie that I have some degree of mixed feelings about, its not in any way shape or form a bad movie but its also a movie that I am struggling to recommend in my movie discussions but firstly the Philippou brothers (good South Australian kids by the way) do a good job directing the film, it is sick and twisted in all the best ways and during those moments I had a big devilish grin on my face.

The film also has some great performances, Barratt and Wong work well together as a brother and sister pair and you understand where Andy is coming from in terms of protecting his younger sister, she has low vision and has lost her parents so he has to step up to help look after her and help her navigate the wider world around her, Wong makes for a good young actress and she is asked to do quite a bit here and she does it well, Jonah Wren Phillips is also great here as Oliver another of Laura’s adopted kids who doesn’t talk but his presence with his eyes makes him a memorable character.

But Sally Hawkins is the real MVP here and I really really hope she is given an Academy Award nomination next year but given the Academy’s reluctance to nominate horror movie performances I will sadly not be surprised if she misses out but that doesn’t change the fact that she is fantastic here, finding when to be warm, when to show the unease under the surface and when to embrace the darkness growing inside her that her grief over her daughter’s death has helped to create and the lengths she will go to make her a great villain.

But sadly this movie as well made and performed as it is is at times too bleak to sit through, there is so much discussion and setup about grief and trauma and loss that after a while I just got tired of it because it was so grimdark as they say nowadays that I began to find it off putting, okay we get it your all hurting but you all are just wallowing in it so much throughout this movie and the more this movie has sat in my head since seeing it the more that feeling has come to my mind the most.

And I am not someone who dislikes dark movies or shows, I generally enjoy them for the most part but having a dark and bleak tone is a fine line to walk for me and if filmmakers aren’t careful it can either feel like it is dark to the point of parody (Matt Reeves’s The Batman was a good example of this) or it feels so bleak that you feel uncomfortable sitting in your cinema seat watching it unfold.

And also this movie has a really interesting use of a VHS player in a key sideplot that sadly doesn’t get the payoff I wish it got as those parts of the film had me really interested in them and I sat there after a while thinking “I hope this has a good payoff” and it kind of does but this sideplot in particular is only revisited every now and then and I wish we got more to it but these things happen.

And so that was Bring Her Back and sadly it is a mixed bag the more I have thought about it, it is well made and has some great performances but its overt bleakness and lack of a proper sideplot payoff weigh it down for me, 2 and a half out of 5.