Bring Her Back
Mark White
Andy (Billy Barratt) and his blind sister Piper (Sora Wong) arrive home to the worrying silence of their household; Dad is home and in the shower, but after a prolonged stretch of time of water running and no sound, the siblings worry that something is wrong and break into the bath-room…to discover that their father has died – naked and rigid, covered in his own vomit, eyes lazily locked and looking up. Shaken and desperate to stay together, Andy and Piper find themselves being sent to the care of foster carer Laura (Sally Hawkins), whose chipped lavender glitter nail polish, wild dark hair, and wide and full smile all work to assure the pair that they are in good hands. Laura is unconventional to say the least – swearing and telling wild stories, and hugging and touching faces. She has opened her home to these grieving children, looking to give them a safe place to recover.
But something is not quite right…Piper gets the old bedroom of Laura’s deceased – and also blind – daughter Cathy, while Andy is given a bare mattress in the storage room of the house. And then there is the matter of the other child in Laura’s care, Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips) who’s eyes are somewhat bloodshot, his head shaved bald over a gaunt face, and is almost completely mute; Ollie lurks about the house and the grounds in deeply strange ways, with Laura telling her two new wards that he has been traumatized and has been this way since he arrived. But Ollie’s behavior is erratic – and violent – leading Laura to keep him locked in his room. And as Laura begins spending more time doting on Piper and being invasive of Andy’s teenage privacy and intrusive over his emotional turbulence, Andy begins to wonder just what has happened to Ollie, and whether Laura can truly be trusted to care for him and his sister.
The Philippous waste very little time lingering over the trauma of Andy and Piper finding their dead father and move them straight into Laura’s care for two reasons: the plot demands moving the kids into the location of the promised supernatural horror yet to unfold – so simply moving the plot along – as well as to keep certain elements of the siblings’ history repressed until it bursts forward to be dealt with in the midst of the domestic horrors being played out. Keeping Andy and Piper relatively sparse as characters as such, both works and hinders the developing story of the film as a result; we get very little details to work with as an audience to form strong attach-ments with Andy and Piper upfront, leaving us feeling slightly detached from them. But once de-tails about them come out in the face of truly terrible violence, there is an undeniable swell of sympathy and care for them both that effectively leaves us feeling afraid for them. Cleverly (maybe even a stroke of brilliance), the writing features a repeated phrase between Andy and Piper that establishes storied childhood familiarity between the two that produces the strongest emotional base for the entirety of the film; grapefruit is the ‘secret password’ shared between the two for when full honesty and disclosure is demanded from one to the other, and its use helps punctuate moments of peril and decision-making with emotion and tension in equal measure. But the sparsity of the writing overall does keep the film feeling rather cold in a way that TALK TO ME never was. Details and character traits are often minimized with the intention of focusing on the more primal reactions to what is happening to Andy and Piper in Laura’s care, but this oftenleaves the audience wanting more concrete explanations, either for clarity or out of provoked cu-riosity. While some details do finally get revealed, the pay off does not feel as emotionally weighty or as intense as the Philippous seem to intend…
…which is why the acting in this film is the strongest weapon – and saving grace – in scaring and torturing its audience. Andy and Piper are introduced to us as very close siblings at the very be-ginning of the film, showcasing Andy’s protective and attentive nature in keeping his very kind and rather lonely sister safe. Barratt and Wong play their respective roles so well, especially against and with one another, that the alluded to elements of backstory gel together far better than any teased elements in the script offer. They sell their relationship and its history with ef-fortless chemistry; before we are told any specific details about their lives together, their perfor-mances offer color to the setup. Interestingly, as Laura’s motive and actions become clear, it is Barratt’s Andy that gets more emotional range to showcase as the untrusting and suspicious older brother dealing with massive amounts of repressed trauma, while Wong’s Piper becomes the un-witting target of the malicious intentions of their foster mother. Barratt – himself the youngest International Emmy winner as an actor – plays with every emotion a teenage boy can here – and that is before all the body horror stuff starts. His reactions are perfectly measured as a boy on the cusp of manhood and yet so scared of what his past may do to dictate his future, let alone what his creepy ‘new brother’ may be doing slamming things around in his bedroom.
Riding almost solely on a powerfully sad-and-deranged performance by Sally Hawkins, the Philippou brothers deliver another chilling depiction of the supernatural as an expression of the darker side of humanity, albeit a marked step down from their benchmark-making "Talk to Me."
And then, there is Hawkins’ Laura. Hawkins brings everything she has to Laura, elevating the character of a grieving mother out of the cliches of the genre and into something incredibly com-plex and terrifying. Laura is no Norma Bates or Pamela Vorhees. Which is to say, she is not the classic ‘overbearing mother’ who has issues with her children and now ‘on a rampage’; we are treated to many moments – both from Laura’s past as well as her actively caring for Piper – where we bear witness to a mother who deeply loved her daughter, wherein the role of being a mother to a wonderful child – especially one that needed her so much more than most children might – defined Laura and gave her purpose. The totality of losing Cathy defines Hawkins’ portal of Laura in every frame, from a mother trying to move on, to offering maternal care and kindness (even fun) to Andy and Piper. But the sheer grief in Laura bleeds through as Hawkins speaks and moves and takes her to outrageous mania. With watery eyes and tense desperation in moments, Hawkins gives us a mother who is on the verge of doing anything necessary to get her daughter back – anything. It is an emotionally devastating performance that definitively gives us a ‘monster’ to fear, but with Hawkins’ skilled sensitivity, it stands out with enough understated empathy that we understand her, but become terrified watching her all the same. It is a masterful reminder of how close Hawkins has been to an Oscar (twice) and that she was arguably robbed for her skilled work in The Shape of Water.
As this is an A24 horror film – and a Philippou film as well – the practical horror effects on hand are exceedingly gory and visceral. There is everything from teeth being dislodged in open mouths, exposed muscles and tendons, expanding, distended bellies and much more – saying nothing of the body horror and violence played back on VHS tapes that underscore the ritualistic practices that serve as Laura’s motivation throughout the film. Make no mistake, this is a tactile horror film much like the Philippou’s previous one, but without any of the ‘millenial’ style that the social media influenced shots or locations demanded; the practical scares and gore live within the eclectic and lived-in space of a house that used to be a home, so textures for everything in every room feels used and real, and produce real damage and injury when featured. Fair warning – some scenes are not for the faint of heart or stomach, but gore hounds will be elated. While some effects serve simply to create scares and jolts, there is an underlying design at play as to what is going on with Ollie – making the horror that more awful. But beware, viewers may find themselves lacking any appetite afterwards.
In just two films, the Philippou brothers have explored the theme of grief in elevated horror and mined it for different feelings. TALK TO ME explored grief from a place of addiction and de-pression, where Mia (a fantastic Sophie Wilde) is inextricably drawn to using the embalmed hand over and over as a way to try and communicate with her dead mother. Bring Her Back looks at grief and trauma simultaneously, as Andy and Laura – quite separately – have issues grieving parts of their lives and have trauma taking up space in their lives. Bring Her Back gives us two characters who clearly showcase what happens when that trauma – that massive grief – is confronted…or not. The effects of grief can produce trauma within, or manifest outwardly and harm others, and as Andy begins to deal with his grief, he starts to see the trauma that Laura’s grief has created, and just how damaging that can be. While not as narratively satisfying or as visually sharp (that embalmed hand!) as its predecessor, Bring Her Back delivers terror and pa-thos in a crushing display of undying love and a refusal to accept its end. Perhaps too bleak, or perhaps simply a succinctly honest portrayal of despair, this film plunges the Philippous into the heart of human sadness once more, and us right along with them.
Final Thought
Hawkins carries this film, but Barratt is the guy to watch; never has a horror film so perfectly (and viciously) fit a line of dialogue from a Marvel project - ‘what is grief, if not love persevering?’