The Aussie twins who took the film world by storm are back. Be afraid

Two years ago, I was in a suburban cinema in Berlin to see Talk to Me, a buzzy horror film shown in the midnight section of the annual film festival that was the work of young Australian twins, Danny and Michael Philippou. Word was that they already had a following on YouTube, which didn’t mean much to me then. I was more taken by the fact that their feature debut had been snapped up in the recent Sundance Film Festival for an unspecified seven-figure sum by A24, indisputably the most hip and desirable of US distributors. That was more than mere buzz.

The Berlin audience, meanwhile, was heaving with anticipation. The film played. It was cheap but terrifying. It was also clever. When the brothers came out at the end, the audience went wild. They stood, cheered and yelled things in an astonishing show of the kind of fandom where fans and fanned-on belong to each other. Danny and Mike yelled things back. There was no doubt about it: these guys were rock stars.

Joe Bird in Talk To Me, the debut feature that put Australian brothers Danny and Michael Philippou on the global cinema map.Credit: Umbrella Entertainment

Their new film, Bring Her Back – which, whatever that banging three-word title may suggest, is not a sequel – is obviously better funded and more complex than the story of the dead hand from the world of demons in Talk to Her.

Sally Hawkins – famous to even younger audiences than the horror cohort as the adorably scatty mother in Paddington Bear – plays Laura, a bereaved mother who has lost her daughter, left her job as a social worker and now takes in foster children. Her belief, which would certainly shock her former colleagues, is that these stray children can be drained of both blood and spirit to revive her own child’s corpse. Absolutely dreadful things are happening in her garden shed.

Dreadful things are happening in Laura’s (Sally Hawkins) garden shed.Credit: Sony Pictures

She is found out, however, when she is obliged to take in two siblings: Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger half-sister Piper (Sora Wong). Piper is only partially sighted, as is Wong in real life. Laura’s daughter was blind too. She is thrilled to have this new version of her child, dressing her up in her daughter’s old clothes, even as she is presumably planning to consume her. She just has to get rid of the tiresome older brother, who has made it clear he intends to become his sister’s guardian once he turns 18. Therein lies the complexity of Bring Her Back: it is as much about grief, jealousy and possessive love as it is about grisly kids with bloodshot eyes.

“I was just obsessed with creating a character-driven horror,” says Danny, who writes their scripts with a friend, Bill Hinzman; the Philippous work together on production. “And that’s the idea,” adds Michael. “That the mother’s character would be that loving mum portrayed in Paddington. It’s that thing of someone who is consumed by love and grief and gone down a wrong path, what that looks like.”

Hawkins brings to the role those dramatic chops – and a very credible middle-class Australian accent – but Bring Her Back still has the raw energy, enthusiasm for fake blood and feel for the sinister vacancy of Australian suburbia that made Talk to Me so compelling.

The twins have said that for that film, they drew on a history of suicide in their own family. The heroine’s pain after her mentally ill mother kills herself is entwined with a fear that she had inherited that instability. At one time, the twins harboured similar anxieties.

The new film, they say, is also grounded in family tragedy. When their cousin’s two-year-old child died, “it was like a shell-shock moment,” says Danny. “It was a very intense time for her and that sort of fed into the script a little bit.” Then they lost a close family friend, aged just 22. “So, naturally, scenes that were meant to be scary became quite sad. It was part of the grieving process.

“We were very open about this with Sally. There was a cathartic moment towards the end of the film where everyone in the room was crying, because it felt like all those dark parts, all that sadness, led up to this one moment.”

Danny and Michael Philippou on the set of Bring Her Back.Credit: Sony Pictures

Hinzman was surprised when he saw the turn the film had taken. “He was saying: ‘it wasn’t written like this!’” says Danny. “But there’s nowhere to put that sadness except in the thing that you’re doing and it just changed it. It couldn’t not have. That wouldn’t have been honest, wouldn’t have been real. I feel like what makes the strongest art is when you’re really vulnerable and very open – and you are very personal with the characters.”

I wonder about the inclusion of the supernatural, made properly spooky in a home-movie prologue depicting some kind of sacrificial blood-sucking ritual in the Carpathians. When you’ve already lined up a mad woman, weird children, a potential victim who can’t see and this powerful reservoir of real-life pain, isn’t this mumbo-jumbo superfluous?

“I was trying to find something to physically represent the grief,” Danny explains. “Grief is something that can eat you alive if you let it. That is the feeling, that it’s gnawing away at you. It was trying to find a way of showing these things through a horror lens. I’m obsessed with horror films that are able to portray really dark things in a fun way. Not ‘fun’ fun,” he adds hastily. “Horror fun.”

“Fun” is probably their most-used word. The two of them work closely with their make-up designer, Rebecca Burrato. “Trying to find ways to execute things practically that haven’t been on camera before, that task and that mission, is always the most exciting thing,” Danny says. “The face is so vulnerable. What you can do with teeth! With eyes!”

That sense of play is particularly important when working – as they are here – with children. “Yeah, you’ve got to keep it fun for them,” says Michael. “You don’t want the set to be a depressing place to come to. You’re already going to have to deal with those scenes. You don’t want that to be their environment all the time."

Sora Wong and Billy Barratt in Bring Her Back.Credit: Sony Pictures

Wong was 11 when the film was made. The brothers found her through an extensive casting call; they wanted someone who was visually impaired, not simply pretending. Blind victims of preying monsters are something of a horror staple, since their inability to see the scary thing in front of them creates instant suspense. Having chosen that character, however, the brothers pull back from exploiting the opportunity; Piper’s lack of sight is a plot point, but it doesn’t mean she’s an easy punching bag. On the contrary, struggling for independence has made her tough.

They were inspired, says Danny, by a friend’s sister who is about the same age, partially sighted and insistent not only on her independence, but her love of tough sports. The whole crew went to play Go Ball – a team game designed for the visually impaired – with her.

“It’s the most painful frickin’ sport, I could not believe it,” says Danny. Wong turned out to be enthusiastically physical too. “She wanted to do all her own stunts, even like rolling down a hill. She’s the best! I was inspired by that. So she was putting herself into those situations and we changed certain lines so they were comfortable for her. I said: ‘Put yourself into the film as much as possible.’”

Sally Hawkins and Jonah Wren Phillips in Bring Her Back.Credit: Sony Pictures

The same went for Jonah Wren Phillips, who plays Oliver, another of Laura’s captive children, reduced by blood-sucking to a wordless zombie. Phillips’ parents, both actors, would come to the set and they would work together on Oliver’s various monster faces.“So it’s like a collaborative process and a fun task to do with him,” says Danny. “Like Oliver is getting more and more horrific as the story progresses, so what does he look like? Finding that language and those character beats with his parents was so fun.”

There’s that word again, But after “fun”, their most-used word would be “vulnerable”, which puts a different spin on the work. Long before they began shooting, they organised days out where various characters – Andy and Piper, Laura and her colleagues – would spend time together in character, improvising conversations.

“There’s a lived history to that and you can feel it on screen,” says Danny. The truly vulnerable character here is, in fact, the murderer; when Hawkins’ Laura pleads with an old friend for understanding, even the brothers were heartbroken. Body horror gives that pain a shape. “It was never about being a splatter film or a slash film, where there’s blood and guts everywhere,” he says. “We said: ‘let’s really let these moments mean something’.”

Bring Her Back opens in cinemas on May 29.

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