Bring Her Back, the sophomore effort of sibling filmmaking team Danny and Michael Philippou, is hand-me-down schlock put across with a fair level of panache. It utilizes a supernatural premise — essentially a gloss on “The Monkey’s Paw” — as a pretext for some of the most savage gross-out imagery in recent mainstream cinema. But since this is an A24 release, it comes cloaked in themes of “grief” and “trauma” and such stuff as “elevated” horror is made of. Those motifs don’t raise the material so much as inflate it; the movie is simply mean and ugly. But in a fun way.
Seventeen-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and pre-teen, non-sighted Piper (Sora Wong) are still reeling from their father’s violent, possibly self-inflicted death when they are placed in the care of foster parent Laura (Sally Hawkins), who, they quickly discover, is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. The other child in her care, Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips), is a non-verbal boy of about nine with a penchant for strangling cats and eating flies. What’s more, Laura seems to be hiding something dreadful in the pool house that may be connected to the snuff video she keeps popping into the VCR and studying like an instruction manual. Things get even hairier from there, but to say more would spoil the few surprises the film has up its sleeve.
Wren Philips gives literal meaning to “chew the scenery.”
The Australian-born Philippous started their careers as YouTubers collectively known as RackaRacka. A brief scan of their portfolio gives the impression that they have ingested the entirety of Western pop culture — especially movie culture — and contracted a bad case of the trots. As in their breakout hit Talk to Me, they invoke evil occult tropes with the gleeful abandon of teenagers discovering a Ouija board in their parents’ attic. What would normally take Roman Polanski an hour-and-a-half to build up to, they throw away in the first few minutes. To their credit, there are images peppered here and there that are hard to shake, and ordinary inanimate objects are bestowed with a malicious energy that suggests a knack for framing and cutting that place them a cut above their competitors in the horror racket.
Even so, Bring Her Back combines so many ingredients — death cults, soul transference, evil children, blind girls in peril, found footage — that the final product comes out tasting like nothing in particular. There is no sense of religious conviction behind these powerful tropes and no curiosity about their origin. The cult (who are they?), the tape (where did she get it?), the demon (whence did it come?) are elements that are left dangling. And what, exactly, do the filmmakers believe about any of this? Like the work of Robert Eggers and Ari Aster — to name a couple of top auteurs from the A24 stable — the scrupulous attention to physical detail is a smokescreen to conceal the lack of a personal point of view.
What keeps everything relatively grounded is the total commitment of the actors involved. Hawkins, who at times seems to be channeling Shelley Winters in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, is the sort of performer who seems constitutionally incapable of giving anything less than her best, and she gets all the choice lines. Barratt and Wong are quite touching as inseparable siblings — something the Philippou twins actually know a thing or two about — and Wren Philips, who gives literal meaning to “chew the scenery,” goes through the sort of ordeal that Linda Blair underwent in The Exorcist. (One hopes he has a good care team.) Sally-Anne Upton also has a tasty supporting role as a social worker who wears a lime-green sweater to go with her lime-green sedan. If they do not rescue Bring Her Back from its myriad absurdities and unpleasantries, they at least offset the mayhem with a needed touch of human warmth. ❖
Nathaniel Bell is a Los Angeles–based writer who has been writing for L.A. Weekly and the Village Voice since 2021.