Bring Her Back (2025)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Foster Scare

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

This Australian horror movie by filmmaker brothers Danny and Michael Philippou struggles with some of its plot logic, but Bring Her Back is still a dark, emotional powerhouse of an experience, dealing with grief and implementing water as a murderous metaphor.

Piper (Sora Wong) is blind and has trouble fitting in at school. Her older half-brother Andy (Billy Barratt) has appointed himself her caretaker; they have a special code word ("grapefruit") when they need to know that the other is telling the truth about something.

Tragedy strikes when their father dies in the shower. Andy, a few months shy of 18, isn't legally allowed to care for Piper, and they refuse to be split up, so they are sent to stay with foster mother Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former counselor. Aside from a creepy stuffed dog, the other resident of the home is Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) a strange, selectively mute, and weirdly threatening boy.

At times Laura seems helpful, and at other times, she seems unbalanced. Indeed, she seems to be trying to drive the siblings apart, drawing Piper closer to her, as if working toward some nefarious goal.

The Philippou brothers follow up their equally brutal Talk to Me with Bring Her Back (Danny wrote the screenplay with Bill Hinzman). There are several moments that knock us out of the movie with questions about how the characters are so easily manipulated in certain sequences, and one especially dumb sequence in which Andy goes for help, but does it in the most clueless way possible.

However, the movie's emotions are on point, and it's hard not to get caught up in feelings of loss and mourning and anguish. The Philippous create a cold, inky visual scheme with water everywhere, always deadly. Characters drown or are almost drowned, killed in showers, or injured on slippery surfaces. A rainstorm figures prominently into the story, and even the urine Laura uses to humiliate Andy (and the ice keeping a corpse frozen) might count as malevolent uses of liquids.

The three central actors give very strong, convincing performances; it's unsurprising that Sally Hawkins is impressive in a much darker role than she usually gets (it's similar to Hugh Grant's transformation in Heretic), but Sora Wong — who in real life is blind in one eye and severely sight-impaired in the other — makes her acting debut a moment to remember. Bring Her Back isn't exactly an easy watch, but it has a genuineness that's hard to deny.