Bring Her Back is the most unsettling film of the year

Grief is a leveller in this new movie. Seventeen-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger, partially sighted stepsister Piper (Sora Wong) are sucked into the Australian care system following the death of their father. That neither child has a present mother suggests this is not the first bereavement for either. The authorities want to split them up, but Andy fights for them to stay together. He is Piper’s protector; his job, as he sees it, is to filter out the ugliness of the world before it reaches her.

Fortunately, there’s a foster carer who is prepared to take them both in: Laura (Sally Hawkins, vibrating with forced cheer and neediness). She, too, has recently suffered a loss: the death by drowning of her daughter Cathy. She understands, she tells them, voice sticky with sympathy, what they are going through. She is markedly less empathetic when it comes to the other child she is fostering, a creepy, crop-haired urchin named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). He hasn’t spoken since Cathy died, Laura says casually, as she locks him in his bedroom and hides the kitchen knives. Perhaps predictably, Laura sees something of her late daughter in Piper, and sets about driving a wedge between the siblings. But the macabre details of her plan to replace Cathy still come as a gooey, stomach-churning shock.

It’s a smart move, this harnessing of grief in the service of horror. It provides a universal anchor for the story. However specific the setting, grief and that distorting, deranging pang of loss is something to which we can all relate to an extent. If it’s a canny device, though, it’s also a cynical one. The bereaved central characters of both Philippou films are broken and bent out of shape by loss even before they are chewed up by whatever paranormal unpleasantness the brothers have in store for them. Part of what makes their movies so effective is the ruthlessness with which they direct towards peril their most vulnerable characters: the heartsick, the desperate, the very young and very alone. This, to my mind, cheapens the chills Bring Her Back delivers.

Like Talk to Me, this is a film that takes us to the darkest of places. Once there, it’s not remotely inclined to offer us an easy way out. Bring Her Back is bleak – perhaps not quite as unremitting as the 2022 Danish horror Speak No Evil, to which it bears certain similarities, but ultimately this will be a dispiriting watch for many viewers. For all the buzz around the Philippous, I’m not convinced they are offering more than any other jobbing horror hacks. They may favour the slow build of tension over jump scares, but the use of a VHS-taped occult instruction manual as a piece of exposition is lazy, cliched and uninspired.

Two aspects of the film, however, are genuinely excellent. One is the sound design, cleverly employed to evoke Piper’s visually impaired experience of the world (and to inflict aural torture on any audience member who is in the least bit squeamish about teeth). The other is Hawkins’s superb and utterly chilling performance. Mumsy in her knitwear, she flashes a mad gash of a smile that looks as though it’s being operated with fish hooks. She strikes a tricky balance between cuddliness and monstrous cruelty. It’s as if somebody hand-knitted a psychopath – and it’s one of the scariest things I’ve seen this year.

Photograph by A24