When it opened in July of 2022, Talk to Me became one of those summer horror-movie phenoms: a scary flick everyone wanted to submit themselves to. Its sibling filmmakers, Danny and Michael Philippou, were young talents, their careers bred on YouTube—and their movie, about a bunch of Australian kids channeling spirits through a mummified hand, had hardcore shocks, a modest running time, and a clever concept: demonic possession as a viral trend. It made a tidy $92 million, on a reported budget of just over $4 million, and no wonder—the movie was heady, horrific fun.
Now comes their follow-up, with a soundalike title, but quite a different mood—more mournful, more anguished, more serious. Here is the story of two orphaned Australian teenagers who move into an isolated house with a foster mother, Laura (Sally Hawkins), grieving her own loss—that of her young daughter—and harboring a ghoulish plan to bring the dead girl back to life.
Will Bring Her Back haul in the millions? I’m not sure—the movie lacks the rambunctious thrills of Talk to Me—but it has more depth, subtle performances, and will stick with me longer.
And it has Sally Hawkins. I suppose after seeing unimpeachable talents like Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, and Florence Pugh topline horror movies, it should come as no surprise that Hawkins has done the same. But still there’s something novel here: reimagining the brightly beaming star of the Paddington movies as a suburban psychopath is a world-class act of counterintuitive casting. Hawkins’s Laura is a diminutive, hippy-dippy monster who takes the two siblings, Piper and Andy, in and promptly starts fucking with them. The younger sibling, Piper, who is mostly blind (she’s played by the vision-impaired actress Sora Wong) and stridently independent (she refuses to use her mobility stick), is seduced by Laura’s ministrations. Her brother, Andy (Billy Barratt, who is a tousle-haired revelation), is a different story. He’s suspicious from the start, but also vulnerable and traumatized and not able to do more than keep a wary eye on Laura, a watchfulness that amplifies the movie’s unease. There’s also another boy in the house: Laura’s young son, Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips), who says not a word and stalks around, mostly shirtless, like an adolescent zombie.
What is going on in Bring Her Back? I personally loved how coy and restrained the Philippous can be in their storytelling—mood is more important than careful explanations to these writer-directors—but the leaps in logic may annoy some people. Nevertheless, you viscerally understand that the occult rituals Laura furtively watches on hoarded videotapes are a prelude to something awful she herself is planning. And you figure out early that Ollie isn’t actually Laura’s son, or entirely human. His eyes aren’t right, his belly is distending grotesquely, and he eats anything in sight, including, in one indelible scene, the blade of a kitchen knife.
Is there anything better than summer horror? The months to come have a lot in store: Dangerous Animals, 28 Years Later, M3GAN 2.0, Weapons. I’m sure there are more that haven’t made my list. But Bring Her Back should be on yours. It’s a great start to a horror-movie summer.
