“Bring Her Back,” Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou’s dread-sweating follow-up to their ghost story chiller “Talk To Me,” is a truly nasty piece of work. A24 wants you to know this as a selling point, with the basis of their marketing campaign almost exclusively utilizing ads featuring night vision-tinted footage of movie goers cringing and leaping out of their chairs in disgust. I can say with honesty that I was dancing the same terrified two-step throughout “Bring Her Back,” a film with a thrilling level of commitment to upsetting gore effects that I am sure most moviegoers have never encountered in a movie theater before. There is blood, there is terror, there is death and madness, but what makes “Bring Her Back” special and wholly unique is, inexplicably, its compassion.
“Bring Her Back” follows a series of unfortunate events that befall a pair of Australian step siblings; a nearly blind young woman looking for independence, Piper (Sora Wong), and her responsible to the point of smothering big brother, Andy (Billy Barratt), after the sudden, traumatic death of their father. With Andy three months from turning eighteen, he is unable to take custody of Piper just yet, and the pair are entrusted into the care of eccentric former counselor Laura (Sally Hawkins of “Wonka” and “Paddington 2” fame), who lives in her secluded home with her slightly creepy stuffed dog. Oh, and there is also another child at the property, Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips), a mute boy with a Sinead O’Connor buzz cut and a penchant for getting a little too rough with the cat. It is clear immediately to the audience that something is amiss with Laura as we learn that her daughter recently drowned in the now dry pool in the backyard. Laura seems to actively resent Andy’s presence, as if his being there were an inconvenient roadblock to some other designs for Piper, designs only hinted at through Laura’s playing and replaying of a VHS tape of some ungodly ritual, which we learn to be an instruction manual of seemingly inhuman intent. We see bodies writhing within damp salt circles and a pair of naked practitioners hanging a woman while another watches through blood red eyes. The first moments of the film, glitched against VHS static and tracking lines, show the phrase “THIS IS NOT A CULT” superimposed against the prone form of a dead body and set the tone for our descent into the abyss. But abandon hope not, all ye who enter here. Though you might imagine “Bring Her Back” to be a nihilistic exercise in assaultive trauma a la “Hereditary,” this film is so much more.
Saying that resurrection is on the menu cannot be considered a spoiler for a film called “Bring Her Back.” To let slip that Laura is attempting to resurrect her recently drowned child is like saying there are snapples and crackles in a box of Rice Krispies. THAT is a movie we’ve seen before and, frankly, the one that I thought I was gladly sitting down for. Boy, was I thrilled to be wrong. Carrying the film firmly on their shoulders, Wong and Barratt are the kind of movie siblings it’s easy to want to protect; they’ve lived through catastrophe, but they’ve gone through them together. The Phillipou Brothers often place the audience in Piper’s POV, a world of loosely colored shapes and smells, a world ill fit for the supernatural atrocities soon unleashed upon her. She is in no way helpless, but a child, like so many, whose natural impediments can be weaponized by adults, as evidenced by the constant use of loud sound to mask atrocities from Piper’s knowledge. Perspective is a key element to the film, and ultimately the factor which raises it from the world of enjoyable blood-spouting novelty into something grander, more intimate, and cutting. Sally Hawkins is instantly unsettling as Laura as she welcomes the children into her home with the overcompensating generosity of a witch in a candy house and the rictus grin of a crazed jackal. That her work is mostly known to popular audiences as Paddington and Willy Wonka’s Mom offers us a “feature, not a bug” performance, allowing her to find gentle nuance within the character’s chasm-deep fissures of grief and desperation. Laura is despicable for what she has done and for what she is doing, and a lesser film would leave it at that. But as the film’s devastating conclusion makes clear, there is a line of inhumanity that even the mad won’t cross. Even Paddington’s Mom can become corrupted by love.
I was left weeping through the climax, which I certainly did not expect. Throughout the film, I had been cringing, punching the air, holding my mouth in absolute horror, thinking I knew where “Bring Her Back” was going and, frankly, underestimating the skill of the filmmakers. I signed up for an ever-escalating slice and dice picture, perhaps even a downer ending to befit A24’s self-imposed moniker for the film as the “Feel Bad Movie of the Year”. And then, as the ritual is laid bare for us and the fetid dominoes begin to fall, the movie does something extraordinary. If there is anything in this review that I might want to allow the audience to savor, it is this tonal shift. It is rare for a movie that presents this much cruelty to also find within its same subject matter this much, dare I say it, restraint. Laura is a mother who lost her daughter and her mind with it. “I’d do anything to hear Cathy say my name again,” Hawkins says early in the film. It is easy to spin those words as understandable or, within the context of the film, threatening. But what the Philippou Brothers find within one woman’s maddening grief is not a lack of hope or meaning, but salvation and earnest love. This ritual she has decided to undertake is inhuman in its cruelty, but not in its intent. The desire to bring back what we love at any cost is in many ways the most human impulse imaginable, and is all the scarier for it. In the face of tragedy, love can metastasize into something monstrous that consumes the memory of the beloved and lost, threatening to bastardize their existence and leave their memory a bloody scrape gathering flies on the asphalt. But it doesn’t have to be. There’s always a way back from the brink, and kindness, though sometimes malformed and barely recognizable, is always accessible even in the darkest of pits. The Philippou Brothers found something profound in the dregs of unnatural perversity, and for that, I thank them.
“Bring Her Back” will prove a divisive film, one that I saw several audience members leave mid-way through, out of unease or nausea. I’m sure that fifty percent of those reading this might have similar reactions. This one is not for the faint of heart or stomach. But for those willing to descend, to contend with this tapestry woven in decomposing flesh and pain, you will be rewarded with a horror film that plumbs the depths and comes back with something unique, disgusting, and inexplicably hopeful to carry home with you.
Take the plunge.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Bring Her Back” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
