Last week, I saw the 2025 Australian supernatural horror film Bring Her Back, directed by Danny and Michael Philippou and written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman. The film focuses on step-siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), who are placed in foster care after finding their father dead in the shower. Andy is a few months away from turning 18, and wants to apply for guardianship of Piper, who is also visually impaired. They don't want to be split up in the foster care system, so they are placed in the care of Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former counselor whose daughter Cathy (who also was visually impaired) recently passed away, so she is excited to take care of Piper, seeing her as a surrogate daughter, and showing much more favoritism towards her than to Andy, who she views as a troublemaker. Laura is also taking care of her mute foster child Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who keeps acting out in disturbing ways and is a threat to the pet cat (and thankfully no actual harm comes to the cat during the movie).
Laura is all smiles and cheeriness, playing up that kind of positivity that Hawkins portrayed in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, but views Andy as a threat, who sees more red flags going on than Piper is aware of. She goes through his phone messages, she makes him kiss his father's corpse at his funeral, she blames him if Oliver gets out of his room and destroys things, and she manipulates things to make Andy seem dangerous to get rid of him and have Piper to herself. Andy is determined to protect Piper from Laura's danger, and keeps trying to reach out to authorities for help, but Laura keeps finding ways to swing things back around to her favor.
Sally Hawkins is fantastic in this film, and is great at playing up the manipulative personality of a woman who is grieving the loss of her daughter, and going to extremes to want to "bring her back," which includes conducting occult practices, as seen in VHS found footage tapes of demonic cult rituals. Laura also takes advantage of Piper's disability, lying to her about her surroundings whenever there is anything disturbing, since she can see blurry shapes and colors but not definite images like a sighted person can.
Andy is torn between grieving the loss of his father, while also remembering his father as abusive towards him, but affectionate towards Piper, so Piper has a more loving memory of him than he did, and having nightmare flashbacks of his father when he's in the shower, reliving the trauma of finding him dead there.
The child actors excel in this film, especially with Phillips playing a disturbed child, in difficult scenes where he is performing twisted acts, especially a scene involving a knife, so hopefully he was well taken care of while filming horror scenes like that. Wong shines more in the last third of the film, as she as Piper becomes more aware of Laura's nature, and having to defend herself while being visually impaired, which makes for some really suspenseful scenes. And Barratt holds the film together with a lot of vulnerability as Andy, as a traumatized kid on the brink of adulthood struggling with grief while trying to protect his sister from danger.
There's a lot of dread in the film, and a frequent use of water as a threat, like the empty swimming pool filling up with rainwater, hearing rain tapping outside, the isolated feeling of Laura's home, and the loneliness while the main characters are all grieving in their own ways.
I really liked this film, and found it interesting in being about grief and focusing more so on character studies. I wasn't as into the demonic cult stuff, especially if it got too gory, but the film was held together by solid acting performances and a bleak narrative that was compelling to watch.
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