by Eric Lindbom
BRING HER BACK (in theaters) takes elevated horror far past the top floor onto the roof, and some viewers will lunge for a railing.
Grief-stricken Laura (Sally Hawkins) lost her visually impaired daughter, Cathy, in a pool drowning and intentionally seeks to foster a similarly disabled teen, Piper (Sora Wong). To her dismay, she must also house Piper’s protective brother, Andrew (Billy Barratt). Initially, a carefree foster mom without boundaries, she allows her underage charges to drink liquor and interrogates them about their trauma over their deceased father. She’s also vague about Oliver (Jonah Wren Philips), her third foster child, a mute with a death stare kept under lock and key.
Laura showers Piper affectionately while trying to create a rift between the siblings, as Andrew is rightly suspicious. His instincts are sharp because Laura, driven mad with grief, wants to use Oliver and Piper in a ghastly, murderous ritual she believes will bring Cathy back to life.
Australian filmmaking brothers Danny and Michael Philippou burst on the arthouse horror scene with the riveting, popular TALK TO ME. With elements of THE RING and the short story THE MONKEY’S PAW, it revolved around a severed, embalmed hand and had the catnip trope of demonic possession as a form of recreational drug abuse by a group of truth or dare teens. While targeting the customary youth crowd, TALK TO ME wielded a sky-high skill set thanks to the visual chops of the Phillippous, previous viral sensations for creating short comedy horror works, and wrestling clips.
Similarly, BRING HER BACK oozes with the brothers’ knack for stark, arresting images. It’s not for nothing that the orphaned siblings found their dead dad in the shower. Watery images douse the film, especially the empty swimming pool that will fill up after a storm so Laura can fulfill a plan spurred by a series of eerie, grainy, instructional videos.
Wikipedia describes the “rules” of the ritual better than the Philippous and their co-writer Bill Hinzman. “The process requires a demon-possessed vessel to consume a corpse, then vomit the remains into a newly dead body that died in the same way. Laura plans to drown Piper in the swimming pool during a rainstorm to replicate Cathy’s death, then use the demon-possessed Oliver to complete the ritual. Still with me?
The young cast is consistently believable, but the ringer is Sally Hawkins. This emotive artist has a gift for making socially awkward characters not quirky but unsettling, while never losing our rooting interest. In Mike Leigh’s HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, she is so manically sunny that she puts the other characters on edge, and in Guillermo del Toro’s THE SHAPE OF WATER, she makes loneliness seem valiant. Here, she bravely inhabits her role not as a sadist but as a sad woman driven insane by grief – the type who could more innocently get suckered into paying for seances.
The truly spooky character is Wren’s Oliver, who salivates with hunger, awaiting the rainstorm. He rips his mouth bloody, biting down on a fork, the squirm factor familiar to anyone who’s made the same mistake and chipped a tooth. Elsewhere, he chomps on a wooden table. These scenes are intentionally painful, even for most of us now numbed to tsunamis of bloodshed and goofy slapstick decapitations.
BRING HER BACK has been described to me as unnecessarily grueling, though it’s less violent than network TV shows like CRIMINAL MINDS. It’s adult work, in the mature vs. salacious sense, and uncompromising in its intensity and vision. The scares are earned, and I heartily recommend it to discerning and gutsy viewers.
Eric Lindbom is a hardcore horror buff with a strong stomach, weaned on the Universal classics from the ’30s and ’40s. He’s written film and/or music reviews for City Pages, Twin Cities Reader, LA WEEKLY, Request magazine and Netflix. He co-edits triggerwarningshortfiction.com, a site specializing in horror, fantasy and crime short stories with illustrations by co-editor John Skewes. He lives in Los Angeles.
