Bring Her Back: Sally Hawkins is terrifying in the Philippous’ foster-family horror

Danny and Michael Philippou graduated from Youtube horror skits to features with the accomplished Talk to Me (2022), in which communicating with the dead becomes a social media craze but brings a bad case of demon possession to one Australian home. Like that film, Bring Her Back turns on sibling relationships, possession (of a sort) and the under-acknowledged heroism of teenagers who are too easily written off as problem kids. Again, a plot motor is an older sibling’s need to save a younger one from a dreadful fate. However, Bring Her Back adds a significant adult in Sally Hawkins’ remarkably complicated (and in some scenes terrifying) antagonist.

Smothering foster-mum Laura (Hawkins) seems at first a familiar film figure. With her wild clothes (and hair), profane talk and edge-of-desperation jollity, she could be one of those immature grown-ups forced to become responsible by sudden parenthood (real or surrogate) in comedies like Uncle Buck (1989), About a Boy (2002), Bad Santa (2003) or Young Adult (2003). 

After her foster children attend their father’s funeral, she asks teenage Andy what he’d like to do to change the mood. When he jokingly responds “get hammered”, she sets up a drinking game with whisky shots, even giving younger, partially sighted Piper hard liquor. It is revealed in plot lurches that Laura is a much darker, more dangerous character – unpredictably demented yet plausible. She gaslights Andy into believing he’s a bed-wetter and alternately coddles and goads him into revealing a backstory she can use against him and a temper that might make him a danger to the household. Crucially, she makes Andy think she’s afraid of him and that Piper should be.

The Philippous are sensitive without being smug about it. As Piper, Sora Wong – a partially sighted teenager with no previous acting experience – is exceptional in many scenes with Andy, played by Billy Barratt, a proven performer who won an Emmy for TV movie Responsible Child (2019). Andy and Piper are real in a way characters in even upmarket horror films often aren’t: they have history, catchphrases, a spiky-yet-devoted relationship, and neither asks for special treatment because of their circumstances.

A tiny sequence with Piper playing a team sport designed for the blind sets up a film technique – closing in on her with crucial information the character can’t see off the edge of the screen – that turns out to be necessary for the climax; it also shows that she’s a dab hand at throwing things in the direction of sounds. When Piper is chased about the house, she can strike back with accuracy, surprising Laura with a sudden missile, though she isn’t the kind of ‘super blind lady’ Audrey Hepburn played in Wait Until Dark (1967) and often smacks painfully into walls or tumbles down slopes. The plot hinges on Laura’s backyard swimming pool, where her daughter drowned – a hazard to Piper whether or not it’s full of water.

Bring Her Back is a rare horror film that trusts its audience to pick up exposition from asides (such as a blurry Russian VHS of a gruesome ritual). Horror tropes, like the binding circle drawn in non-waterproof whitewash around Laura’s isolated home, or the foster child who falls into the ‘demon kid’ category, set off alarm bells, while brief wrongnesses signal that supposedly responsible Laura has gone far beyond normal boundaries of behaviour. 

When Piper asks for a description of her mute new foster brother, Laura says the shaven-headed Oliver has curly red hair – then looks to Andy to confirm the lie, making him complicit in a tiny abuse of his sister’s trust. She offhandedly admits to murdering the children’s father then acts as if Andy has misheard her. Laura is a carer who doesn’t care. Her only focus is on a cracked but apparently workable supernatural scheme to resurrect her dead daughter in which innocents will be not so much sacrificed as used and thrown away. Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) is another remarkable creation: a sequence involving his misuse of a kitchen knife should take prizes in any listing of hard-to-watch, horribly relatable acts of harm in this year’s horror movies.

► Bring Her Back is in UK cinemas now.