Monday 28 July 2025 6:01 pm | Updated: Monday 28 July 2025 6:08 pm

Bring Her Back film review: stomach-churning gore

Bring Her Back film review and star rating: ★★★★

Filmmaking brothers Danny and Michael Philippou hit the horror spotlight in 2022 with Talk To Me, an innovative piece that brought supernatural spookiness into the 21 st Century.

It became studio A24’s most successful horror, reaching bigger audiences than their other entries in the genre including Hereditary, Heretic and The Witch.

This month, the Philippou brothers return with follow-up project Bring Her Back. The film centres on siblings Piper (Sora Wong), a partially sighted teenage girl; and her older brother Andy (Billy Barratt). The pair are left without a home following their father’s death from a drug overdose, and while Andy is willing to care for his sister, he is just short of his eighteenth birthday.

Bring Her Back: the gore occasionally gets in the way of the plot

They are sent to live with foster parent Laura (Sally Hawkins), a grieving mother who cares for a mute boy named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). Laura’s unusual behaviour makes Andy suspicious, unearthing uncomfortable secrets.

While Talk To Me was fairly narratively lean, at times Bring Her Back almost feels like a family drama, with more effort put into the broader story and developing a richer picture of our subjects.

Grief prevails in every part of Bring Her Back, as the Philippous family investigates loss from various viewpoints. There are some terrific performances from the cast, particularly youngster Barratt who feels as if he has the weight of the world on his shoulders, although we’re always starkly reminded he is still just a child.

By contrast, Phillips is captivatingly sinister. Given the number of genres the star has succeeded in, from the Oscar winning Shape Of Water to Mike Leigh’s grounded drama Happy Go Lucky, it’s interesting to note that the actor hasn’t featured prominently in a horror film before. She reminds me of Nurse Ratched but dressed in hippie attire, and the plot sees her hide a string of despicable acts behind a veil of civility, until the mask slips in the final act to reveal something demonic.

Her younger co-stars keep up wonderfully, with Wong providing the heart while 12-year-old Phillips adds humanity that makes his unholy transformation all the more unsettling. The collaborative effort allows for a surprisingly affecting final act.

Be it through over-ambition or inexperience, the Bring Her Back directors occasionally have a tough time balancing the emotion and the scares. Clearly the intent was to create visuals that seer themselves into your brain but also provide a worthwhile plot. The balance is mostly maintained, but some of the more subtle character beats are undermined when followed up by stomach-churning gore. Nevertheless, Bring Her Back has all the frights you’d expect, but with a lot more depth than most horror films you’ll see this year. There’s a sense that the Philippou Brothers are just getting started, and a masterpiece of the genre lies somewhere in their future.