Bring Her Back is Nasty as Hell

I love the idea of brothers who direct together. I can imagine the incredibly wholesome moments when two creative brothers come up with an idea so cool that they can't help but jump for joy. I'm sure just the thought of that would make their mother smile from ear to ear. Even if that idea is a little boy biting down on a kitchen knife until his lips split… or a little boy biting down on the edge of a countertop, the splinters of his broken teeth mixing with blood and wood to create an earthly delight for the demon that lives inside him … or a little boy eating a chicken alive.

And it's all the same boy! He's a busy fella for most of the Philippou brother's Bring Her Back, the follow up to Talk to Me, one of my favourite horror movies of 2022. Following the tragic death of their father, siblings Andy and Piper enter the care of their new foster mother Laura (Sally Hawkins ) and her mute son Ollie. Things quickly become weird, depressing and so disgusting I nearly vomited in the theatre.

I'm going to start with what I liked about this film: the nasty stuff. The Philippou brothers are connoisseurs of viscera and violence and their intelligent choice to never restrain themselves is what makes Bring Her Back worth watching. Just like in Talk to Me, the directors gleefully force us to watch one of the most gut wrenching moments of brutal self-inflicted harm in mainstream cinema. Having a child bite down into a wooden countertop and showing us everything that happens until his top and bottom teeth meet was horrific.

To me, the scariest and most unsettling moments are the scenes of the Russian snuff film on VHS showing a step-by-step instruction on how to use a demon to bring someone back from the dead. It's a hint of something ancient, a taste of folk magic that has endured the years, kept in the dark only for those most desperate. A demonic snuff film! That's cool as hell! How Laura even acquired it is beyond me, but that's not important. What is important is how she uses that videotape as a guide on how to bring her daughter back: by killing Piper in the same manner in which her own daughter died.

But the most insidious thing is the psychological torture she inflicts on Andy. Informed by her years as a child psychologist and counsellor, she transforms each of her skills into incendiary devices to burn Andy out from the inside. It's cruel and infuriating. So much so that when Laura finally puts Andy out of his misery, a man in my audience yelled out, “Nooooooo! That's bullshit!" I agree, my man, child abuse is bullshit.

There's a sort of Hansel and Gretel aspect that is draped lightly over this film; two lost children literally finding themselves at a house in the middle of the woods. A house that looks like it's straight out of a storybook with its oblong architecture and funky interior design. This time, perspective given to the witch’s actions, who, in this instance, isn't trying to eat their bodies, but consume their souls. The Philippou brothers want us to sympathize with the witch and feel for her despite all of her cruelty. And that's where Bring Her Back's biggest problems lie.

Bring Her Back feels like the directors came up with the absolutely saddest, most depressing concept possible that ultimately feels weightless. It was a marathon of misery with no reprieve. A brutal story about grief and trauma involving children and their intentions kind of end there.

The actual story and its intended emotional weight feels shallow. There's a scene where Laura and Andy get hammered together to blow off some steam. In an attempt to connect, Laura and Andy turn their backs to each other and talk about their trauma. Andy talks about losing his dad and Laura talks about losing her daughter. In that moment, when the filmmakers needed me to connect with Laura most, is where I emotionally disengaged. It felt so telegraphed and cliche that I couldn't help but know how it was all going to play out for the next hour and a bit.

The heart of the story unfortunately rings hollow. It lacks verisimilitude. I know Laura is hurting and wants her daughter back, but I don't feel it. Yes, her actions are drastic and those of a person who has nothing to lose, but none of it resonated deep enough with me. It was as if the story of two children who, no matter what they do, cannot escape constant abuse, burned me out so quickly that I just couldn't grasp onto what the filmmakers wanted me to feel. The siblings have a safe word for when they need support from each other. It’s “grapefruit". It’s cutesy and miserable. The foreshadowing of the safe word was so obvious that I feel like I could have predicted, word for word, how it would be used at the end.

In the midst of all that and within the horror lies the true tragedy of the film: the story of Ollie/Connor Byrd. Ollie, a mute child who Laura claims is her son, is in actually Connor Byrd, a child she kidnapped and forced into being the host of the demon she has summoned to bring her daughter back from the dead. The boy mutilates himself, slicing his hand open on glass, filling himself on corpses causing his belly to distend and rupture, and eating furniture because the thing inside him needs to feed.

Luckily for Ollie he can't feel a thing, right? There is no Ollie. Only a demon gestating inside its flesh cocoon. At least, that's what we’re led to believe. There's a moment where Andy hands Ollie some paper and a pen. He writes the word, “Byrd.” His own last name. A message to alert Andy to who he really is. Alert him to the little boy trapped inside feeling absolutely everything.

This shocked me when I realized that all those horrible moments, scenes of stomach turning violence that had me clapping my hands and cheering thinking I was experiencing my usual horror fare, was the destruction of a scared child who just wanted to go home. In its most unflinching moments lived beautifully subtlety. The true heart of Bring Her Back was that of Connor Byrd, the victim of Laura's most devious abuse, the receptacle for her pain and desperation.

The ending of the film is bleak. Laura is dead. Andy is dead. Piper has no one left, but Connor Byrd is free from the hell he was living long before the events of the film began.