Not too far into Bring Her Back, the latest iteration of the A24 “grief is the real horror” subgenre, a recently orphaned 17-year-old, Andy (Billy Barratt, leading an excellent youth cast), slices a triangle of melon for his damaged, mute foster brother, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips).
The film’s directors, the brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, cleverly cut away from the younger, leaving the viewer to savour the sound of breaking teeth.
It’s the first of several self-harm-themed Grand Guignol spectacles in a film that’s strewn with gristle but is curiously short of starts and frights. The energetic chaos of the film-makers’ breakout hit gives way to something more restrained, not necessarily more profound.
Bring Her Back opens with promise: Sally Hawkins plays Laura, an eccentric foster mother who welcomes two grieving siblings – Andy and the visually impaired Piper (Sora Wong) – into her chintzy home on the edge of nowhere.
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What begins as a twisted riff on Hansel and Gretel spirals into a grisly meditation on trauma, punctuated by unsettling dark-web videos, gaslighting and a supernatural ritual that is never satisfactorily explained.
Hawkins is the film’s greatest asset, weaponising her gentle, whimsical Paddington-mom screen persona to discombobulating effect. Her Laura is motherly, dotty and menacing, coaxing Piper with sweet nothings while psychologically tormenting Andy.
The house, littered with relics from Laura’s past and VHS tapes of a long-dead daughter, becomes a mausoleum of psychic distress. The Philippous lean heavily on body horror to drive the story’s emotional beats, finding novel, sickening uses for kitchen utensils along the way.
For all this gory audacity, the film falters when it tries to articulate its emotional core or its plot mechanics. Third-act revelations are head-scratching. The exploration of trauma and parenthood – especially Andy’s memories of abuse and Laura’s grief-fuelled delusion – can feel tacked on.
Piper’s impairment is treated with care, especially through immersive visual techniques; however, she often functions more as a plot device than a fully developed character.
No matter: the Philippous can still freak you out with flair.
