Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back is a bleak and harrowing exploration of grief, trauma, and the terrifying consequences of trying to undo loss. If their 2022 debut Talk to Me carved out a space for the twins as new masters of supernatural horror, their follow-up shifts gears into something heavier, more suffocating, and far less forgiving. This time, the horror does not come from playful party tricks with the dead, but from the crushing weight of sorrow and the violent, desperate ways it manifests.
The film opens with a gut punch: Andy, played with raw vulnerability by Billy Barratt, comes home to find his father dead in the shower. Suddenly, Andy and his blind sister Piper (Sora Wong) are orphaned, forced to navigate a system that threatens to separate them. They are taken in by Laura, a former social worker whose own child drowned years earlier. Laura, embodied with unnerving intensity by Sally Hawkins, initially appears compassionate, even maternal, but there’s something fractured lurking beneath her surface. Her kindness quickly mutates into obsession, and her home reveals itself as a shrine to forbidden rituals and occult practices, a place where grief curdles into horror.
The narrative is deceptively simple but grows more disturbing with each scene. Laura is consumed by the belief that the dead can be coaxed back, and in Andy and Piper she sees not just children in need, but tools for her twisted longing. VHS tapes filled with Eastern European resurrection rites, chalk-drawn circles, and strange ritualistic objects litter her home. The children are trapped not only by circumstance but by a woman whose grief has transformed her into something unrecognizable. Hawkins makes this character terrifying not because she is outwardly monstrous but because she begins from a place of love. That desperate love, warped and stretched beyond recognition, is the true engine of the film’s horror.
The Philippous once again prove that their strength lies in atmosphere. Bring Her Back does not rely on easy exposition to explain its supernatural undertones. Instead, dread seeps in slowly, like water rising in a room. Shadows linger longer than they should, sounds ring with piercing sharpness, and the camera lingers on faces until the intimacy itself becomes unbearable. Aaron McLisky’s cinematography, crisp yet suffocating, transforms ordinary rooms into chambers of dread. The framing often traps characters in tight spaces, reflecting their emotional imprisonment. Sound design plays a crucial role too—scratches, whispers, and dissonant tones crawl under the skin until viewers feel as disoriented as Andy and Piper.
At the heart of the film, though, is Hawkins. Her performance is nothing short of astonishing, oscillating between gentle warmth and feral desperation. She can deliver a line with the tenderness of a loving mother, only to twist it seconds later into a veiled threat. Hawkins makes Laura frightening not because she is evil in the traditional horror sense, but because her grief has metastasized into something violent and controlling. It is a performance that lingers, haunting in its refusal to draw clean lines between empathy and madness.
Thematically, Bring Her Back is about the corrosive power of grief. The Philippous ask what happens when sorrow goes unchecked, when the pain of losing a child overwhelms the natural process of mourning and warps it into obsession. The result is not a ghost story in the traditional sense but a psychological study of how trauma itself can become monstrous. It is a film less interested in clean narrative arcs than in suffocating its audience with the feeling of being trapped inside another person’s grief. Viewers expecting straightforward scares or tidy explanations may find themselves frustrated, but those open to its ambiguity will find something far more unsettling.
The VHS ritual sequences exemplify this ambiguity. Grainy, cryptic, and unsettling, the footage flashes across the screen like fragments of a nightmare. We are not given clear context for these images until much later, which means for most of the runtime we’re watching without understanding what we’ve seen. That lack of clarity becomes a source of unease, pulling us deeper into the film’s atmosphere of dread. Are we witnessing genuine rituals, delusions, or simply foreshadowing? The inability to categorize the footage mirrors Andy and Piper’s own confusion, making the audience complicit in their sense of entrapment.
Adding to this claustrophobic unease are sudden explosions of violence. The film is not soaked in gore from start to finish, but when violence erupts, it does so with shocking force. These outbursts land like shattering glass in the middle of the slow burn, jarring the audience out of whatever fragile stability they might have felt. They serve less as spectacle than as punctuation, reminding us that beneath the simmering grief and dread lies the potential for destruction at any moment. By withholding these eruptions until just the right points, the Philippous crank the tension even tighter.
The layering of grotesque imagery and moments of narrative chaos sometimes threatens to overwhelm the film's emotional core, but it is bound to the filmmakers’ refusal to play it safe. They aren’t interested in replicating the sleek rhythm of Talk to Me; they are intent on crafting something rawer, something more bruising.
Bring Her Back succeeds because it understands that the most frightening monsters are not ghosts or demons, but grief itself. The supernatural trappings—the chalk circles, the rituals, the whispered promises of resurrection—are less important than the raw emotions fueling them. The film asks a simple but devastating question: how far would you go to undo loss, and who might you destroy in the process? In Laura, we see the answer, and it is more terrifying than any spirit could ever be.
The Philippous have crafted a follow-up that may divide audiences but will cement their reputation as filmmakers unafraid of discomfort. Where Talk to Me was sleek and sharp, Bring Her Back is messy, heavy, and unrelenting. It is a film that leaves you shaken, not through cheap scares but through its relentless depiction of love curdled into cruelty. You do not walk away entertained so much as unsettled, with its images gnawing at you long after the credits roll.
In the end, Bring Her Back is a film about the futility of refusing to let go. Grief is inescapable, and in trying to reverse it, Laura becomes its victim as much as its vessel. The film lingers like a wound that won’t close, daring you to confront the darkness in love itself. For those willing to endure it, it is one of the most powerful and disturbing horror films of the year.
Bring Her Back is a must-own film for any horror fan. It's available to own today!