'Bring Her Back' review: A chilling descent into possession, grief, and ritual horror
Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back delivers a deeply unsettling experience that trades the frenetic energy of their breakout debut Talk To Me for a more insidious, brooding exploration of possession, grief, and fractured familial bonds. Set in a quiet suburb saturated with creeping dread, the film stars Sally Hawkins in a disarmingly unnerving performance that flips her familiar on-screen warmth into something far more sinister.
Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back blends possession horror, childhood trauma, and occult dread into a slow-burning, emotionally raw thriller.
Brink Her Back
Bring Her Back
Laura, played by Hawkins, is a well-meaning but increasingly unstable foster mother grappling with the recent death of her daughter. When she takes in teenage Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger, visually impaired sister Piper (Sora Wong), the line between nurturing care and obsessive attachment begins to erode. Her affection quickly gravitates toward Piper, while Andy finds himself adrift in a home that feels anything but safe.
Atmospheric clues that something is wrong arrive gradually and ominously. Laura’s erratic behavior slips past the children but not the audience: clandestine rituals, unsettling VHS tapes, and cryptic symbols etched in chalk begin to tell a parallel story. These motifs build toward a sense of overwhelming unease, mirroring the siblings’ slow realization that the past — and perhaps something far older — is asserting itself.
Billy Barratt brings a taut, reactive energy to Andy, a teen burdened by responsibility yet caught in events far beyond his control. Sora Wong’s Piper, vulnerable but perceptive, offers a nuanced performance that anchors the supernatural elements in emotional realism. As their dynamic with Laura grows increasingly warped, the audience is drawn into a labyrinth of grief-fueled obsession and occult manipulation.
Visually, Bring Her Back is dense with metaphor. Fogged mirrors, distorted reflections, and rippling water surfaces reinforce the theme of partial visibility — truths half-glimpsed, realities only faintly discerned. The Philippou brothers, with cinematographer Aaron McLisky, create a world shrouded in ambiguity. Cornel Wilczek’s score adds an infernal undercurrent that fluctuates between whisper and scream, evoking tension that rarely releases.
Elements of the narrative resist easy interpretation. The appearance of Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), a mute and unnerving child with a shaven head, injects a jarring presence into an already unstable household. His origins remain elusive, feeding the film’s strategy of elliptical storytelling. Where Talk To Me thrived on kinetic pacing and social-media-savvy horror, Bring Her Back burrows into the subconscious, favoring an impressionistic and disjointed form that mirrors trauma’s lingering effects.
Layered visuals and recurring motifs — circles, cracks, and blurred boundaries — establish a mood of disorientation. The film doesn’t seek clarity so much as evoke the sensation of being haunted by the unknown. It’s a horror that prefers to whisper than scream, but its implications are no less terrifying.
What makes Bring Her Back especially harrowing is its unflinching gaze at childhood vulnerability. The violence, when it comes, is brief but brutal, made all the more disturbing by the way it interrupts the film’s muted tones. Scenes of domestic chaos and emotional ambiguity crescendo into imagery that’s both grotesque and metaphorically charged.
Rarely does a possession narrative lean so heavily into psychological realism while maintaining supernatural ambiguity. The Philippou brothers have crafted a film that doesn’t explain itself — it invites viewers to dwell in its shadows and draw their own conclusions. Through Laura, they conjure a monster made not of evil but of misdirected love and unresolved loss.
