The Philippou brothers have a real talent for showing teenagers doing dumb things. Bad decisions keep the gears of the horror genre turning — where would scary movies be without characters who discover the light switch at the top of the basement stairs isn’t working, then go down into the ominous darkness anyway? But when characters make lousy calls in Danny and Michael Philippou’s 2022 directing debut, Talk to Me, and their new film, Bring Her Back, it’s not because the plot requires them to. It’s because they’re inexperienced and impulsive, still thinking more like children than adults, sometimes rebelling against authority and at other times too trusting of it. The Philippous approach their characters’ youth not as something abstract, but as an immediate and vivid state, a connection that their years spent as YouTubers probably helped them maintain. In Talk to Me, high-schoolers find an embalmed hand that allows whoever grips it to get possessed by the dead, and they treat it like an awesome party trick rather than proof of an afterlife — an approach so perversely respectful of teen bravado that it deserves a salute.
Andy (Billy Barratt), the closest thing Bring Her Back has to a main character, doesn’t have the benefit of that bravado — he’s just traumatized, lost, and 17, on the verge of legal adulthood but still very much a kid. There’s a fascinating rawness to the way the film portrays Andy that echoes Mia (Sophie Wilde) in Talk to Me, someone who disguised her ravenous neediness with a grin and a joke, all her grief bottled up inside. Andy has appointed himself the protector of his younger stepsister, Piper (Sora Wong) — a role that has included everything from protecting her from other girls’ mockery to hiding the fact that their father has been abusing him. After the sudden death of their father, he plans to become her guardian so that they can get a place together when he turns 18 in a few months, a hope that’s complicated by the fact that an incident from his past has earned him the label of “troubled” and could jeopardize their placement together in foster care. Running through Bring Her Back are some tantalizingly underdeveloped ideas about how we’re so primed to see young men as potential sources of violence that we overlook the possibility of their being victimized. Andy’s volatile background makes him an easy target for Laura (Sally Hawkins), the foster mother who begrudgingly takes him in alongside Piper.
Bring Her Back is a more emotionally ambitious movie than Talk to Me, though it’s also messier. Hawkins’s performance as a woman who was destroyed by the death of her daughter, more so than anyone around her seems to realize, both powers and unbalances the film. Hawkins plays Laura like a sinister kindergarten teacher, all chunky jewelry and blatant favoritism. She showers Piper — who has impaired vision, just like her late child Cathy — with an alarming amount of affection that the girl drinks up, while turning a cold shoulder to Andy, who’s sent to sleep in what looks like a storage room. She’s the fun caretaker, inviting her new charges to indulge in some illicit booze then slyly pouring urine on the passed-out Andy’s crotch so she can belittle him the next day for pissing himself in the night. Andy, incoherent and apologetic, already feeling unwanted and desperately desiring to trust the new adult in his life, doesn’t stand a chance against her efforts to portray him as someone she should be afraid of. Hawkins is a boundlessly talented actor, and it’s fun to watch her turn those powers to evil by playing a former counselor who understands children so well that she’s fantastically good at manipulating them in pursuit of her grand scheme.
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The broad aims of that scheme are clear early on, but the specifics only emerge slowly, in a creepy drip of details like the white circle drawn around Laura’s property, or the VHS footage of an eerie ritual being conducted in another country, or the way that Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), Laura’s nonverbal other foster, seems intent on eating the cat. Hawkins’s performance is so towering and compelling that she overwhelms her younger co-stars, especially Wong, a first-timer whose character is given a frustratingly fragmented arc. But Phillips has no trouble keeping up with her. With his huge eyes and resting glower, he’s responsible for the bulk of the film’s slow-build scares, layered in more and more prosthetics as Bring Her Back winds its way toward its terrible conclusion. The movie’s most effective gross-out moment makes gleeful use of the fact that Oliver is a child who ought to be protected, but who is also scary as fuck. It involves another bad decision from Andy, though it’s not the sort you expect from a typical horror movie. It’s the rough call of a teenager who’s reluctant to accept that the adult who’s tasked with taking care of him instead sees him as an obstacle — and it’s hard to blame him for that.
