‘Bring Her Back,’ from directors Danny and Michael Philippou and written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, is a classic-styled horror film that is rooted in human emotion and opts out of CGI and favours practical effects to create a real sense of dread and terror. The scares come from amplifying the situation and how vulnerable and helpless our protagonists are. The film never employs cheap tricks or cheap jump scares for easy reactions but works slowly to get under our skin. And it succeeds immensely at this.

The film is the story Andy and Piper. The two are siblings and Piper being partially sighted. At the get-go, we can see how close the two are, with Andy protecting Piper from the harshness of the world through little white lies and their closeness is displayed in ways like their secret codes and catch words only both of them understand. The siblings share a father, though their mothers are different but the closeness of the two is evident. When their father dies from an accident, the two are sent to foster care. Andy is only 17 but he fights to stay with Piper so that he can adopt her as her legal guardian when he turns 18. Enter Laura, a kooky, eccentric former counselor, who becomes the foster mother of Piper. She takes in the two siblings under her care but she harbors a dark secret and her closeness to Piper hides sinister plans.

The set up is long but it is not uneventful. From the get-go, we already know or feel something is up with Laura. The directors take their time to present us with myriad obstacles – Piper’s partial blindness, Andy’s former difficult past, how reclusive and isolated Laura’s home is to the rest of the city, the fact that Laura has legal guardianship of Piper and Andy is only living with them as a technicality – these already create tension and suspense. Things are exacerbated as Laura is also caring for another foster child, Oliver, who is unresponsive and sometimes violent. He is locked up in his room when Laura is not present and you just know things are not right here.

Soon, the film begins to peel back the veneer and we can see Laura trying to drive a wedge between Andy and Piper and the stakes got higher and Andy starts to catch on that everything is not right. Tensions build and the battle for Piper goes full blast.

‘Bring Her Back’ is pure horror. Just the idea of how vulnerable Piper and Andy are is already a cause for fright but the weirdness and the supernatural elements that are slowly revealed makes everything even more thrilling. Oliver’s transformations throughout the film is awe-inspiring and also fearsome. The fact that it’s not CGI but really good prosthetics and a fantastic performance by Jonah Wren Phillips is astounding.

In fact, the whole cast is incredible from Billy Barratt as Andy and Sora Wong as Piper; Wong, who really is partially sighted. The two have incredible chemistry and really ground the film’s story by making you really root for them. 

But the real star of this movie is Oscar nominee Sally Hawkins as Laura. Her Laura is a riveting, fascinating character study of grief and pain and loss. She manages the backstory of Laura through her ability to shift gears emotionally throughout the film. As more and more is revealed about her character, we start to see the layers that she has carefully built in her performance from the first moment we see her as a kooky, eccentric woman to the fearsome thing she has become because of her character’s history. She’s a force of nature that manages to humanize her and allows us a glimpse of who she is that allows her to the monstrous things she does is the movie.

From the same directors of the hit horror film ‘Talk To Me,’ the Philippou brothers does it again by giving us a wonderfully layered, very human horror film that never pulls back on the scares. By using primarily practical effects, what we see on screen can move us while also scaring us fully. ‘Bring Her Back’ is an intelligent horror film that will get you engaged and invested in the characters and the story.

My Rating:

Bring Her Back is now showing, don’t miss this hauntingly powerful horror on the big screen. Check showtimes and catch the action on the big screen here.