Bring Her Back review — a first-rate horror from Australia’s next genre leaders
After making a killing with Talk To Me, Adelaide’s Philippou twins return with a taut, unsettling horror — this time with a taxidermy dog and Sally Hawkins.
Bring Her Back (MA15+)
99 minutes
In cinemas
★★★★
What do you do when your debut film makes $100m off a $4.5m budget and the overseas studios open their wallets in response? If you’re Adelaide-born twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou you stick with Australia and make an even better film.
Talk To Me, the brothers’ directorial debut, is set in Adelaide and stars an Australian cast and a severed embalmed hand. On its release in 2022 it was picked up by the cutting-edge American distributor A24 and became its highest-grossing horror film.
It’s a scary movie but their new one, Bring Her Back, takes it up a notch. It’s scarier without resorting to chainsaws or any of the other instruments of mayhem that on-screen psychopaths are fond of. It’s tense from start to finish and it shows the now Los Angeles-based brothers’ strengths as filmmakers.
Their first film was also noticed by international actors. And so it is that English actor Sally Hawkins, a dual Oscar nominee (for Blue Jasmine in 2013 and The Shape of Water in 2017), is the star. She commands the screen and her Australian accent is fine.
You may remember her as the mum in the Paddington Bear movies. She’s a mum in this film, too, but there’s a lot less cuddling. “He’s dead. I know. I am a weirdo,’’ she tells her new foster children when they first meet.
She’s referring to a stuffed pet dog in the living room. Soon afterwards, as if to reinforce her point, the dog wears a party hat as the new family downs shots of spirits. “Let’s gets hammered,’’ Laura (Hawkins) tells her new teenage dependants.
It’s around this time, in one of the moments that highlights the directors’ attention to detail, that a chicken loose from the backyard chook pen pecks at a Cheezel on the kitchen floor. There’s a sense of something foul in the air.
The setting is Adelaide and its surrounds. Laura has her own tragic story. Her teenage daughter drowned in the backyard pool, which now sits empty. However, it starts to rain and is forecast to do so for days.
Her new foster children are half-siblings Andy (English actor Billy Barratt), who is soon to turn 18, and the younger Piper (Australian actor Sora Wong), who is partially blind. Their father died in unpleasant circumstances.
Piper “only sees shapes and light … that’s about it”. Wong, 14 when she made the film, is partially sighted. Her performance marks her as an actor to watch. It’s a common enough trope in horror films - the blind and the baddie - but Wong makes it her own.
Who is the baddie in Bring Her Back? An obvious candidate is Laura’s other foster child, 10-year-old Oliver (Australian actor Jonah Wren Phillips in an astonishing performance), who is “selectively mute”. His vacant stare suggests he’s either damaged, about to do some damage, or both.
Other candidates include Laura, who not only puts a party hat on her taxidermied dog but kisses its snout. When she dresses Piper in her dead daughter’s favourite cardigan, she says, “There you are”, and it sounds chilling. She has a shed in the yard she keeps locked.
Or perhaps it is Andy, who is almost a man, works out with weights and wants guardianship of Piper. In another attention-to-detail moment, Andy, far bigger and stronger than Laura, confronts her and she shrinks from him.
Bring Her Back, with A24 to distribute in the US, is written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, as was Talk To Me. Aaron McLisky is cinematographer on each film.
It is a first-rate horror movie that marks the Philippou twins, aged 32, as the next generation of Australian leaders in the genre, following in the footsteps of James Wan and Leigh Whannell, who made their start with the gruesome Saw back in 2004.
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