‘Bring Her Back’ Movie Review: The Sadistic Triumphs of the Philippous’ New Noxious Nightmare

Horror films live or die on the bad decisions of their characters. The Philippou Brothers Undrstand This Better Than Most. In their terrific debut, Talk to meTeengers treated a cursed embalmed hand as a party trick. It was youthful bravado in its Purest, Stupidest Form. Their follow-up, Brings her backIs also built on bad decisions, but these were the kind made by people too young to know better and by adults who should know better, which is precisely white makes it unbaarable to watch. Evil, even.

The film opens with a jolt of grainy vHS footage that depicts some sort of snuff tape-séarance ritual taking place with bodies Dangling, faces mangled and children’s VOICES SHREKING SHRERON MOIN ORORROR, Herard Tare Tell which. The footage recurs throughout the film like a bad memory, and the philippous let it fester, unresolved.

Andy (Billy Barratt), Sevenne and Still Carrying The Scars of His Father’s Abuse, Comes Home One AFTERNOONONOFON with his Half-Sister Piper (Sora WONG), Who is Legally BLED, to Finder Father Father Father Father Father Father Father Father Father Father Father shower. With adulthood just months away, andy is determined to become piper’s guardian. Meanwhile the child services see only two vulnerable minors, and hand them over to laura (sally hawkins), a creepy, foster mother.

We know Hawkins better from the warmth of her eccentricities, like the gentle cleaner in The shape of water and the twinkly mrs. Brown in PaddingtonHere, she turns that warmth inside out. Laura smothers piper with affection, insisting that she and her dead Daughter are “the same,” While insidiily undermining andy at every turn. She spikes the kids with boze, stages manic midnight trauma-dump dance parties, and humiliates andy in ways designed to erode his sense of self. But the cruelty isn’t grandose or gothic. It’s intimate and domestic, and therefore so much more excruciating.

A Still from ‘Bring Her Back’ | Photo Credit: A24

Barratt plays andy with a jittery defense, convined that if he can just survive the next three months he can save his sister. WONG, in her first role, have a natural, watchful stillness that makes piper’s gullibility feel earned, but her loves of cunning, all the more impressive. And thought their bond is the film’s fragile core, it’s hawkins who dominates the screen. She plays laura as a monster in hidding, but also makes her monstrosity obvious enough enough to make us squirm.

But Jonah Wren Phillips is the Film’s Revelation, Whose Mute Foster Child Oliver’s Creeping Presence Colonies Every Corner. With his Blank Scowl, Bruised Eye, and Almost Angelic Androgyny, Phillips Gives One of that that Rare Child Performances that Feel Instantly Etched into the horror canon. This disturbing brand of non-cooperation recalls linda Blair or harvey stepphens and secures phillips as a horror all-timer before his voice has even his burna.

The philippous use the house’s captive rooms and dried swimming pool like psychological traps, like spaces that season designed to unmoor the child. Rain seeps into everything, from the tiles, to the furniture, to the air; Until the entry film feels waterlogged. Their Flashy Visual Language of Needle Drops and Camera Spins has shifted Since Talk to meThe focus now is on visual textures of blood, drool, piss, rainwater staining every frame.

What saves Brings her back From collapsing under its own cruelty is the philippous’ perverse fidelity to the physical. This is a masterclass in staging the indignities of the body. Blood is a sticky, congealing message, while drool clings to lips and piss stains fabric. The sound design duals down on these corporate violations with bones protesting, kanives worrying their way through flesh, and teeth detenating like porcelain. These effects are noting to the slick sadism of torture porn and everything to the clammy tactility of j-Horror. They infest you, crawling under your skin with the intent to stay there.

What distrust Brings her back From so much of contemporary horror is how the philippous refuse to outsource this Sick, Twisted Evil to Metaphor. The genre has become fluent in allegory, and by contrast, the philippous place us in the thick of it. Laura’s manipulation of and piper is not a stand-in for trauma, raather the trauma itself, unfolding in real time. These kids are devoid of any convenient Vantage Point or Ironic Safety Buffer, So the Complicity of Watching them Navigate the Terrible Bind of Needing The Love of Someone Who Herms themste.

A Still from ‘Bring Her Back’ | Photo Credit: A24

The film is deliberately messy. Its dubious mythology of chalk circles, occult vHS footage, and Voodoo Locks of Hair, Never Quite Adds Up as Satifyingly as it did in WeaponsEarlier this month. But coharence isn’t the goal here, because the philippous are chasing a series of sensations-like the sickning dread of being a child in the WRONG HUSE, or the anxiety -ICINTY -INTY -INTY -ICINTY ANCERTAINTY an adult Affection is Protection or Predation.

Brings her back Is Ultimately Powered by Hawkins’s Performance, in one of the Great Villain Turns of Recent Horror. Laura Feels as Though Kindness Itself WERE A Mask That Good Suffocate a Child, And It’s Terrifying because of how recognisibly human it is. The film gnaws at that primal fear that Children are definitions

The philippou brothers may not annual be the new kings of horror, but with Brings her back They’ve at Least Proven Themselves Its Most Sadistic Purveyors of the Decade – Pushing Us Into Yet Another Nightmare We’D Rather Not face and locking the door behind us.

Bring her back is currently run in theatres

Published – August 22, 2025 05:03 pm IST