Bring Her Back Review: Deeply Shocking, Deeply Upsetting, And One Of My Favorites Of 2025 So Far

In my 15-plus years as a professional film critic, I’ve developed my fair share of cinematic pet peeves, and one that particularly gets under my skin is bad exposition. Even the worst visual or special effects ever can’t stymie my investment in a scene faster than one character over-explaining a situation or relationship to another. For one thing, it never fails to register as spoon-feeding and talking down to the audience. Secondly, and more importantly, it always feels lazy: rather than finding a creative or clever way to deliver necessary information, the filmmakers have opted to just spell it all out.

It’s because of this personal grievance that I have quickly grown an affection for the storytelling abilities of Danny and Michael Philippou. One of the things that I love so much about Talk To Me, their feature debut, is that the film doesn’t bend over backwards to explain the origins of the ceramic hand that allows an individual to summon and be possessed by the dead. They have a strict and remarkable command of the “show, don’t tell” philosophy, and it has led them to create another must-see horror movie in their sophomore effort Bring Her Back.

Last time around, the twin filmmakers had great fun splicing possession horror with the use of illicit party drugs. This time around, the material is far grimmer, but it’s no less mesmerizing. The movie is an examination of extreme grief (from that alone you can probably tell why it’s not as “fun” as its processor), and it is spellbinding. Brilliant performances bring to life dynamic characters, and while you’re compelled by the mysterious peril in which the protagonists find themselves, the work simultaneously conjures a macabre curiosity about the evil that is being deliberately kept esoteric.

Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) are step-siblings who begin the film experiencing the trauma of discovering the dead body of their father (Stephen Phillips) in the shower. The brother has hopes of taking guardianship of his sister, who is visually impaired, but he won’t be old enough to do so for three months, so they have to accept placement with a foster parent. More than happy to take them in is Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former counselor who has recently suffered the tragedy of losing her daughter.

From the outset, Laura’s favoring of Piper is a bit odd, but things quickly hit new levels when the newcomers to the house meet their new foster sibling Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) – who is selectively mute, sports a number of injuries, has violent tendencies and is kept locked in his room when nobody is home. It’s Andy’s hope to essentially wait out the clock so that he and his sister can have their own home together, but Laura has her own objectives and knows that his potential guardianship depends on her recommendation.

Bring Her Back is a mystery that demands your attention, and it's highly rewarding.

The Philippou brothers have followed their high concept feature debut with a methodical mystery, and they prove equally adept at handling both narrative forms. Bring Her Back keeps you in the dark about Laura is planning and how she is going about executing said plan, and suspense builds as we watch snippets of seem like VHS snuff films with supernatural overtones and Oliver’s behavior gets more and more bizarre. Getting you emotionally invested is the excellent character development on both sides of the story.

When I talk about navigating bad exposition, this is what I mean: when Andy and Piper have serious conversations, if one of them says, “Grapefruit,” it means that they are asking for the full, unvarnished truth. Nobody ever asks them what it means, and there is never a moment where they explain it to each other; it’s just implicit. And it’s also a perfectly subtle way of telling the audience about how close they are, and it connects you with them and make you care as their circumstances reveal themselves as increasingly dangerous and dark.

Talk To Me is scary, but Bring Her Back steps things up in a big way with its grimness and phenomenal practical horrors.

Paired well with the upped grimness is also upped grotesquerie. I won’t soon forget what happens to poor Riley in Talk To Me, the character repeatedly bashing his head against hard surfaces until copious blood flows, but that’s relatively tame compared to some of the imagery to which audiences will be exposed in Bring Her Back. I’ll state it plainly: this is not a movie for the faint of heart. If you’re not predisposed to liking horror, you will see things here that you will never unsee. If you’re a genre veteran, know that regardless of your watch history, this film is going to make you squirm.

Having already written about one exceptionally gnarly scene I got to witness a few weeks ago at a trailer launch event, I won’t reveal further details of the flesh-ripping, blood-pouring, body-transforming terrors that lie ahead for movie-goers, but I will say that the craftsmanship of the practical effects is masterful. There are exercises in violence and mutilation that border on looking too real, pushing hard on your fight-or-flight instincts. Kudos go all around to the various departments, from makeup to cinematography to sound design, but also deserving special mention is Jonah Wren Phillips, who does some special and bold transformation work for a child actor in what is his second feature. It's a shocking turn in every way from a performer his age.

Sally Hawkins is magnificent, and the Philippou brothers once again get tremendous work from young actors.

The youngest member of the cast has very different work to do compared to his fellow actors, but all of them deliver tremendous performances with the hyper-emotional material. Andy and Piper’s relationship is well-developed on the page, but Billy Barratt and Sora Wong give the characters true weight and make their love as siblings feel real – providing that necessary accentuation to the stakes. On top of everything else going on in the story, Barratt goes deep as Andy grapples with trauma stemming from his troubled relationship with his father, and Wong demonstrates real and impressive natural talent in her first screen appearance.

Meanwhile, Sally Hawkins is taking on a role unlike anything we’ve previously seen her in, and it’s going to further cement her place in genre history paired with her genius turn in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water (albeit in a totally different way). There are parts of the film where we see Laura as the loving and happy mother that Andy and Piper need – showing a free spirit side letting them both get drunk after their father’s funeral – but manic energy in Hawkins’ performance gives way to sinister intention driven by unyielding grief and pain, and the way in which the actress plays both sides of the character is remarkable.

Within the idea that a second feature is a true proving ground, showing that filmmakers aren’t flash in the pan talents with just one great movie in them, Bring Her Back is a major success. Danny and Michael Philippou are legit, and their success here following Talk To Me echoes Ari Aster doing Midsommar after Hereditary and Jordan Peele crafting Us as his follow-up to Get Out. To put it bluntly, they make horror that doesn’t fuck around, and there is real vision apparent that I’m excited to see grow and mature in the years ahead.