‘Bring Her Back’ Review – The Feel Bad Horror Movie of the Year
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Published 6 days ago
on May 22, 2025
Grief consumes directors Danny and Michael Philippou‘s follow-up feature, Bring Her Back. It fuels everything. The kind of primal, all-consuming agony that functions like a black hole, pulling everything nearby into its gravity and extinguishing light. The Philippous’ brand of grief horror is as visceral and brutal as you’d expect based on their feature debut Talk to Me, but without any of the vibrancy or hope. Instead, Bring Her Back operates on an unwavering and palpable feeling of dread and anguish from start to end.
The only truly carefree moment at all in the Philippous’ bleak sophomore effort comes with the opening scene that introduces protective older brother Andy (Billy Barratt) as he picks up his sister Piper (Sora Wong), who is visually impaired, from the bus stop, mere moments after she tries and fails to make new friends. The tender moment between tight-knit siblings comes screeching to a halt when they arrive home to find dad dead in the shower, a traumatic moment that they barely have time to register before social services set about placing them in new homes.
They’re taken in by Laura (Sally Hawkins), an eccentric woman with a rather unusual child already in her care, the mute Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). It turns out that Laura is also acutely familiar with profound loss, and she has plans for her new wards.
