After making a film like Talk To Me, twin brothers and filmmaking partners Danny and Michael Philippou gained quite a reputation for their ability to craft genuinely terrifying narratives about the horrors of growing up in the digital age. But how do you follow up such a debut? You swing for the emotional fences and go even deeper into the darkest corners of grief, focusing on the psychology of their characters rather than just the scares. The result: Bring Her Back. While the story verges on emotional torture porn, with gut punch after gut punch delivered as nauseum, the filmmakers ultimately deliver one of the genre’s most upsetting examinations of the hells of grief supported by incredible performances from actors both seasoned and new.
The film opens with a title card that reads “This is not a cult”, before cutting to grainy handheld footage of a strange ritual being performed in what looks like an abandoned warehouse. Here is where we see that creepy footage featured in all the marketing, as a woman films the odd behavior of a young girl. From these opening scenes, the Philippous drop us right into the world with little to no context. This is indicative of a narrative trend in Bring Her Back, where the story introduces fascinating concepts but ultimately leaves them hanging in frustrating ways.
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From there, we jump to the death of Andy’s (Billy Barratt) dad and Piper’s (Sora Wong) stepdad after he falls in the shower. Andy is almost 18 and joins his sister at their new foster home with the intention of legally adopting her in just a few months. He’s incredibly protective of her, not just because of her age, but because she’s visually impaired. They have their own shorthand to verbally confirm they’re telling the truth, a comfort word (“grapefruit”) meant to provide a feeling of safety in an uncertain world. They arrive at the beautiful and secluded home of Laura (Sally Hawkins), an ex-therapist whose daughter drowned in the backyard pool. Now, she fosters kids to heal the hole in her heart. At least that’s what she tells her new tenants before she begins purposefully sewing discontent between the siblings in increasingly cruel (and violent) ways.
Living with Laura is her other foster child, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who she explains is mute. He stares with unsettling intensity and is unable to communicate whatsoever. He does, however, have quite an appetite. Despite brightly colored furniture, flowy skirts, and seemingly self-aware jokes about being a weirdo, there’s just something weird about Laura. Thus begins a shocking nightmare that delivers tragedy after tragedy, barely allowing the audience to catch their breath after each harrowing turn.
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While the script does piece together most of this terrifying puzzle, as I foreshadowed, this isn’t a movie that’s going to deliver you easy answers. In fact, you may leave the theater with more questions than answers, which is in part due to the Philippous’ script allowing the audience to fill in too many blanks, trusting viewers to establish too many tenuous connections without delivering any confirmation or whisper of explanation. Where the world of Talk to Me is quickly and simply established, Bring Her Back is complex and convoluted. A flash of an otherworldly creature in a mirror cements that this is 100% supernatural horror, but that imagery is never brought up again. Laura has the alchemical symbol for air tattooed on her hand, which is featured prominently on the poster. But the importance of that tattoo or even the tattoo itself is never mentioned.
The Philippous instead focus on bigger emotional swings, asking the audience to try and forget everything but what exactly is happening within these characters’ psyches. And those swings land hard and fast in the gut, knocking the air out of you. But when such visually distinct and frankly necessary breadcrumbs are dropped—like the creature in the mirror or Laura’s tattoo—it’s disappointing that they don’t seem to lead anywhere. The filmmakers tipped the scales a bit too far in the emotional direction, over-correcting after Talk To Me, but nonetheless delivering a devastating story about the violent and all-consuming experience of grief.
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Sally Hawkins once again plays the quirkiest woman you know, but this time her Birkenstocks can’t hide her evil intent. That charming smile becomes disarming as she fusses over Piper and slowly reveals her sinister intentions, manipulating those around her by twisting their words into horrid lies. Hawkins morphs into a woman on the edge, about to snap while facing oblivion, but refuses to back down in the name of her perverse version of love. She embodies the term gaslighting, a vile figure of monstrous motherhood perverted by the experience of grief. The character is squarely villainous, but Hawkins still imbues her with small glimmers of empathy as her exasperated and desperate shrieks rip through the air.
The relationship between step-siblings here is refreshing as Andy protects Piper with everything he has, despite still being a kid himself. He wants to be her hero, but struggles to understand how to manage his own emotions and grief. Barratt deftly carries all that emotional weight on his shoulders, balancing overly saccharine dialogue with heart-wrenching desperation as he learns the truth about their foster mom.
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In her first acting role ever, Wong, who is visually impaired herself, is able to match the proper emotional intensity to sell the cruelty at hand in Bring Her Back. The Philippous use her visual experience to not just craft certain scares and shocking acts of violence, but also to shape the film’s cinematography and visual motif of blurred images and obscuring of the truth.
Rounding out the core cast is Phillips as Oliver, who has quickly earned a top spot in the pantheon of creepiest kids in horror history. With almost no dialogue and very specific physicality augmented by increasingly grotesque prosthetics, Phillips deserves awards for a bone-chilling performance that demands both stoic silence and feral screeching alike. He rounds out a trio of young talent that hold their own against an icon like Sally Hawkins.
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Production designer Vanessa Cerne decorates Laura’s home gorgeously, making it feel perfectly lived in and cluttered, not like a sterile movie set. Every Squishmallow, taxidermied dog, and decorative vase tells a story about who Laura is, or was, as a person. Anna Cahill returns from Talk to Me as costume designer, which shines through her strategic color-blocking and attraction to mustard yellow fabrics. Yellow and purple hues, colors of spring but also colors of bloat and decay, cover Laura and her home, which is nothing but a facade for something sinister and repulsive.
While Bring Her Back leaves perhaps too much to the imagination, especially in its world-building, the Philippou Brothers still showcase an uncanny ability to craft some of the most stomach-churning and heart-wrenching imagery committed to celluloid. Sure to be divisive, particularly for the Talk to Me superfans, Bring Her Back is a calculated risk to prove the filmmaking duo isn’t afraid to go weirder and freakier while shattering a few more taboos along the way. It’s that kind of risk-taking and original storytelling that keeps the genre feeling fresh and consistently relevant in popular culture. Bring Her Back may not completely stick the landing, but it made me feel something so deeply I cried in my car on the way home. And that’s got to count for something, right?
Bring Her Back comes to theaters on May 30, 2025.
Summary
With Bring Her Back, Danny and Michael Philippou deliver one of the genre’s most upsetting examinations of the hells of grief.
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