Jonah Wren Phillips in a scene from Bring Her Back.Elevation Pictures
Bring Her Back
Directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou
Written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman
Starring Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt and Sora Wong
Classification N/A; 104 minutes
Opens in theatres May 30
Critic’s Pick
A few years ago, Toronto film critic Adam Nayman tweeted out an open question that has since bounced back and forth around the more obsessive corners of social media with an impressive virility: “What are some examples of truly evil movies? Not necessarily in terms of depicting it, or thematizing it (or ideology/politics) but that truly feel like they’re channeling something awful into the world?”
Nayman was inspired by a lecture he was preparing about the 1988 Dutch film Spoorloos (The Vanishing) by director George Sluizer. But it didn’t really matter which movie was his or your particular patient zero. The query had – and continues to generate – thousands of different answers, all of which might be considered correct, depending on your own view as to which impulses, ideas and intentions are considered truly, deeply awful.
For instance, the new horror film Bring Her Back feels like it fits the evil-movie bill. A film that focuses on mourning and then proceeds to peel back the seven stages of grief like a hungry child pulling off the skin of an especially ripe orange (or flaying something else entirely), Bring Her Back feels less like a movie than a finely tuned instrument of doom. In the devilish hands of Australian filmmaking brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, evil has been concentrated into an exceptionally and impressively nasty 104 minutes.
After the sleeper success of their 2022 thriller Talk to Me, the Philippous return to the scene of the crime with another look at a family torn apart by supernatural forces. This time, a pair of teenage step-siblings – older brother Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger, partially blind sister Piper (Sora Wong) – are thrust into the dubious care of foster-mother Laura (Sally Hawkins, a long way from Mike Leigh’s kitchen-sink dramas) after the sudden death of their father.
Laura, living in a rural home with the most menacing off-season swimming pool you will ever encounter, seems disturbed from minute one. For starters, she is still processing the accidental drowning death of her young daughter, whose frozen-in-time room Piper is now occupying. And then there’s Laura’s other child, a mute young boy named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), whose stone-faced presence would send the most hardened exorcist running for the hills. Things quickly go from sinister to sickening for Andy and Piper, culminating in eruptions of squishy violence.
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Unrelentingly bleak in its story and gag-inducing in its imagery, the film offers stone-cold proof that the Philippous possess a two-way portal into the abyss. The shocks here are not meant to inspire fits of giggles, like so many contemporary horror flicks. Instead, the terror is palpable, designed to snap your head away from the screen for genuine fear of what sights might flash upon the screen. Extra-evil points go to the foley artists assigned with figuring out just what it might sound like for someone to [redacted] or stick a [redacted] in their [redacted].
Spoorloos, by the way, ends on an ending so bleak that when Sluizer remade his own film in 1993 for Hollywood, the director reworked the ending to a more palatable finale. The Philippous seem to have already anticipated such an eventual sanding-down, closing out Bring Her Back with, if not a happy-ever-after ending, then a righteous evil-dies-tonight coda. It is fine, but not awful. Awful enough, that is.
