Whisper House Press

Film Title: Bring Her Back

Directors: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou

Production Companies: Causeway Films, RackaRacka, Salmira Productions, A24

Release Date: 15 May, 2025

Capone’s Rating: 5⭐ out of 5⭐

Film Content Note (that probably applies to this analysis, as well): absolutely unrelenting trauma, parent death, child death, body horror, gore, and generally disturbing everything else

Spoiler Warning: If you don’t want spoilers, don’t read this analysis.

The Philipous have made a perfect film that very few people are going to love. If you’ve seen this movie already, you know what I mean. But before considering why the film won’t get the appreciation it has earned, I want to run through just some of what works in its favor.

I hate to write what is essentially a laundry list, but this seems most effective for a film with so much going for it. With that in mind, let’s identify this film’s strengths, in the order in which they occur to me sixty minutes after seeing Bring Her Back a second time after a month long gap:

• Noteworthy is the subtlety of the motifs that drive forward the film’s theme—circles and encirclement, raindrops and water, cracked mirrors and glass, and so on. I noticed some of these elements the first time through, but knowing what the film was about on my second watch freed up a lot of cognitive power to track them through the picture. The transition in sounds early in the film, pounding to key clacking; the circle-shaped iron garden element through which Piper and Andy are framed as they arrive at Laura’s home, the circle in which the initial scene is focused and framed, and the closing shot from overhead—again with the Laura in the center of the circle—three key framing shots; the hazy focus in three spots that put us in the perspective of a partially sighted person; the three or four cracked-mirror reflection camera angles: These are just some of the meticulously constructed scene elements that give us the sense of discomfort that makes Bring Her Back so effective.
• Sally Hawkins as Laura is absolutely stunning in her performance. She plays the character written so exceptionally well: She’s sympathetic but absolutely, terrifyingly batshit insane and dangerous. Her body language does some heavy lifting in this film, and where she’s looking—whether it be to the sky, in the mirror, etc.—matters. If the Academy were to give their awards to horror actors, Hawkins would win one for this role. Her arc is so expertly designed, and she hits every mark set out for her by the Bring Her Back team. Billy Barratt (and the makeup artists who made him up for the film) never slips into melodrama as Andy where many others might. This is a matter of direction, sure, but the subtlety in his performance matches the subtlety of the whole project. Jonah Wren Phillips (at twelve years old) is Oliver-né-Connor Bird, and he is the scariest kid I’ve ever seen. He makes Haley Joel Osment ( he was ten while working on The Sixth Sense) downright companionable by comparison; Damien, move over: Oli is here, and he’s got a fucking demon inside him. Phillips will terrify you. (Kodos, again, to the makeup team!) And let us not forget Sora Wong’s Piper, whose fortunes are at the core of this horrific story. She is stellar, as well.
• With any film featuring young actors, the risk is always there: Young people aren’t experienced in the way older folks are. It’s science, right? But when a casting director finds the right young person, boy howdy, magic can be made. And casting director Nikki Barett (who is known, according to IMDB, for her work on 2014’s The Babadook and 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road) will not be mentioned as often as she ought to be. (Is it just me, or is anyone else noticing the electric team from The Babadook showing up doing amazing things elsewhere? That movie’s cinematographer / DP was Radek Ladczuk, who I mentioned by name in my recent review of The Surfer. But I have digressed…)
• Camera angles, long takes, and pans: Whether we’re following a character from over their left shoulder; viewing the activity inside the home from behind and over the head of a character looking in from the outside; panning slowly from Andy’s perspective inside the shower and then panning through the perspective of the father-haint; or the long and pan-and-tilt shot in one of the closing scenes opening that tracks first Laura dragging a body, then follows Oliver waiting and then approaching from poolside, and then pans back to Laura (now in the pool); the perspective and other filmmaking techniques in Bring Her Back contribute in quiet but absolutely constitutional ways to the audience’s continuous sense of dis-ease.
• The sounds in this movie are meaningful for the characters, and they are meaningful for us. The repetition of dripping and drowning sounds are not merely sprinkled throughout the movie—they are a near-constant backdrop in soundscaping. They signify that things are getting worse, getting to their peak, about to drown us along with a character in the film. We are pounded (not in the Chuck Tingle sense) by exploding droplets in the pool as well as against Laura’s home’s windows, a hospital’s window-sills, the windshields of cars, and so on. And there’s that parallel that just occurred to me, among all the other things I’m just now realizing: Laura’s daughter died in a pool, and Andy and Piper’s father died in the shower. I cracked wise to a friend (but with a straight face, because it was not funny) after this viewing that the ASMR in the film was extremely upsetting; and it was 
• The pacing of the Bring Her Back is masterful. From the opening seconds of the first scene, the audience is hit with a hammer. I have come to wonder how many people—not knowing what they were in for—walked out of the theater within the first sixty seconds of the movie. That scene, upsetting as it is, is not our inciting incident. No, that element hits another two or so minutes into the movie, in the second scene featuring our protagonists—Andy and Piper—in which they find their father. He’s dead and sprawled in the nude and covered in his own oral emissions.
• There are a few jump scares in this film, but the movie doesn’t rely on them. I am more annoyed than anything by a movie that’s scary for its jump-cuts. In Bring Her Back, such scares are effective because of how sparingly they’re used and how much slow-build interregnal material intersperses these nad-kicks.
• There’s a lot to be unpacked that you won’t likely see on the first time through the film. For example, the trapezium symbol tattooed on Laura’s right hand—on the purlicue, the internet tells me—appears three times, with a slightly longer and better look at that symbol each of the three times it shows up. Where else does that symbol appear in the film? I’ll have to watch again to find out. Also: What do you find similar here as compared with Psycho (1960)? A refusing-to-grieve family member keeps another one on ice (in one case figuratively, in the other literally) while outsiders are brought into the picture to fill some role vis-a-vis the deceased and the survivor. That’s a longer conversation for someone who knows Hitchcock better than I.
• The most upsetting scenes for me are upsetting in part because of how well they’re crafted. The amount of time, for instance, spent tracking Andy as he’s getting something from a kitchen cabinet gives us the perfect amount of time to settle into the progress he’s making with Oliver before we hear what he hears—when we learn what he learns about what Oliver is doing while Andy’s back is turned. The close-ups in that scene—paired with the absolutely gut-wrenching and worst-ever-best-ever ASMR noted above—are devastating. The same concept played out any number of other ways just wouldn’t work. The Philipous make it happen, and their choices are quietly but undeniably dominant in their success over my body’s wishes not to be disturbed.

I tell the horror authors I interview, “I do not like to be scared.” And it’s true: I don’t like to be frightened, upset, jolted, or otherwise disturbed. I do, however, appreciate a good concept well-executed, and I didn’t spend ten-plus years studying philosophy in university for nothing: I obsess over a concept, pick it apart, and examine how effectively (or ineffectively, which is sometimes more instructive) the concept is related. And so I’m willing to be frightened, upset, jolted, and otherwise disturbed for the sake of an expertly written (kudos to Bill Hinzman, co-writer with Danny Philippou) story. It’s a wonder I love horror so much given that I hate to be scared, and it’s a lucky thing that not much in mainstream (and many indie streams, too) frightens me. I’ve seen a lot of shit.

If you’ve seen this film, you know why I’d worry that not all those who see it will like it. It is unrelenting. It is upsetting. It’s gory, heavily immersive. In other words, it does what the production team wanted it to do. It’s perfect. But I wonder: Who is it for? Maybe that’s not something the artist should worry about. I’m just glad the Philippous were supported in making it.

A last note: I mentioned the Makeup Department above, but here are their names: Sue Carroll, Andrea Hall, Marion Lee, Tracy Phillpot, Jen Rossiter, and Hannah Sinkinson. Folks, you did phenomenal work, too, and I hope you get your due.

In closing, I’ll contextualize my review here in terms of a note about my unscientific star-rating system as it plays out in 5-star versus 10-star systems: There are a number of films I’ve given a 5 out of 5 here but when expanded to IMDB’s 10-star system earn an 8.5 or a 9. Such films that are among the best I’ve seen, are a cut above the 4-of-5-star rating, and yet aren’t perfect as I apply that term. This film does everything right and nothing wrong. It’s a 10 of 10 as well as being a 5 of 5. It’s possible the only other film I’ve felt this way about and written about on Whisper House Press has been 2,000 Meters to Andriivka / 2000 метрів до Андріївки from this year’s Sundance Film Festival (a film I pray shows up on PBS—as did its PBS-produced predecessor, 20 Days in Mariupol—so we can all see it, or all see it again).

So, should you see this film? Yes. At least twice.

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