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‘Bring Her Back’ Review: Horror Where Child Welfare Is Scarier Than the Demon
Forget haunted houses—Bring Her Back turns bureaucracy and parental grief into the actual nightmare. No jump-scare marathon here; this review wades into a foster care system so broken, even the demon seems outmatched. I’m not here to praise the film’s courage; I’m here to point out the collateral damage. Bring Her Back review: if you ever thought child protection was dry paperwork, think again. The real horror is institutional, and it doesn’t need a ghost to get under your skin.
In this article
I Watched ‘Bring Her Back’ and Needed a Hug, a Priest, and Probably a Shower—Review
The Philippou Brothers’ Unlikely Rise: From Viral Mayhem to Mainstream Dread
Back in the internet’s Wild West days, the Philippou brothers didn’t wait for anyone’s permission to start wrecking things for a camera. Their RackaRacka channel made them notorious for inventively reckless stunts—think horror slapstick by way of jackassery, splattered with ketchup and a heap of gleeful self-injury. No one was looking to Australia for genre innovation, yet here came these twins turning suburban living rooms into demolition zones, giving the Australian horror scene a much-needed jolt of kinetic chaos.
From Viral Brawls to Festival Respect: Climbing the Filmmaker Food Chain
As their brand of DIY mayhem collected views by the millions, even skeptics in the industry couldn’t ignore the precision beneath the spectacle. The Philippou brothers weren’t just uploading stunts; they were sharpening a cinematic knife. When they stormed Sundance with Talk to Me, critics and producers started tracing the filmmaker career path that had somehow led from backyard brawls to arthouse acclaim. This was more than a viral fluke—it was how the Philippou brothers evolved as filmmakers, a leap from adolescent provocation to the adult table, carrying just enough unhinged energy to rattle the silverware. If the brothers’ reputation once hinged on breaking furniture, now it was about breaking genre expectations.
Setting the Scene: Adelaide’s Ordinary Streets, Extraordinary Hauntings
Adelaide, Unfiltered: Where Suburbia Turns Sinister
Nobody flies to South Australia for the gothic architecture. This is a land of plain neighborhoods, sunbaked parks, and politely dull cul-de-sacs—until Adelaide’s locations are lensed through a horror director’s eye. The city’s most uneventful streets double as an existential threat, their sameness amplifying the uncanny instead of soothing it. There’s a reason the best setting for Australian horror isn’t a haunted castle, but a brick house with too many locks and an awkward silence between rooms.
Suburban Dread: How the Familiar Morphs Into Menace
The genius of filming a supernatural horror story set in suburban Adelaide is how quickly comfort curdles into paranoia. By using local landscapes that barely register as “cinematic,” the filmmakers invite the audience to question what lies beneath every stretch of beige fence. South Australia becomes more than backdrop; it’s a silent accomplice, amplifying the sense that horror doesn’t need gothic fog or rain-slicked streets. The threat is domestic—hiding behind a neighbor’s drawn curtain, lurking under the fluorescent supermarket lights, disguised as part of the horror landscape.
The Grief Factor: Why This Movie Hurts (in a Good Way)
Death in the House: Parental Trauma as Engine, Not Ornament
Before the first demon shows up, Bring Her Back makes it clear that how horror films handle grief isn’t set dressing—it’s the machinery grinding away beneath the plot. The film wastes no time establishing that every action is rooted in loss, not just for atmosphere, but as a live wire that characters can’t stop touching. The psychological horror premise doesn’t lean on jump scares or gore alone; instead, it’s the pain of family rupture and the dread that, this time, nobody’s coming to fix what’s broken.
Stakes That Cut: The Real Cost of Unprocessed Grief
This isn’t the kind of story where trauma is “overcome.” Here, the film’s emotional stakes are sky-high because every character is, frankly, on the edge. The fear isn’t some vague monster in the dark—it’s the very real threat that unresolved sorrow will pull everyone down with it. What distinguishes Bring Her Back from garden-variety haunted house fare is its place among horror films that explore parental grief: nobody gets to walk away clean, and the scariest ghosts are the ones we bring with us.
Characters in Crisis: Acting That Sticks
Laura Before the Fall: Hawkins Navigates Maternal Madness
A Masterclass in Erosion: How Sally Hawkins Warps Warmth Into Dread
Watching Sally Hawkins unravel as Laura is like seeing an Olympic gymnast turn cartwheels through a minefield. She begins with the kind of maternal presence that social workers put on recruitment posters—soft-spoken, open-faced, always armed with a sad smile. This is the comforting side of Laura’s dual nature in Bring Her Back. But Hawkins doesn’t just nudge her character off the rails; she lets every micro-expression mutate, so that maternal care curdles in real time. One minute she’s serving up gentle wisdom, the next she’s radiating menace with the same line delivery. It’s a calculated psychological transformation: Hawkins never leans into melodrama, but her body language says what her dialogue won’t—there’s damage simmering, and it isn’t going to stay hidden.
The Ticking Bomb: Performance Details and Maternal Roles in a Horror Context
The film lets Hawkins weaponize the tropes of maternal roles in horror. Forget the cliché of the long-suffering mother holding a family together; Laura’s version is more like a support group leader for the dangerously unhinged. Hawkins balances nurturing and unnerving with clinical precision—she’ll bake a cake and then gaslight the guest who eats it. Throughout the first two acts, it’s her restraint that lands the punch. The real achievement of Hawkins’s performance in Bring Her Back is how she keeps the threat at arm’s length, coaxing the audience to root for her sanity, even while she’s stockpiling the psychological napalm.
Andy: Protective Instincts Under Siege
Survival Skills: The Reluctant Guardian in a Broken System
Billy Barratt as Andy is the sort of kid every bleak social drama secretly wants but rarely gets. There’s no precocious bravado or hand-wringing vulnerability—just a kid doing his best to be the shield when every adult in sight is, at best, unreliable. Andy’s character arc is built on defensive maneuvers: silent glances, wary posture, a protective hand that never quite drops from his sister’s shoulder. Barratt plays him as a survivor, not a hero, and the film is better for it.
Sibling Dynamics and the Limits of Agency
What makes Andy matter in this narrative is the friction of sibling relationships and the illusion of control. He’s forever caught between being a surrogate parent and a scared kid. The script throws him at a wall of adult manipulation and expects him to hold the line. Barratt understands that the horror isn’t supernatural—it’s bureaucratic indifference, failed systems, and the slow erosion of agency. The result is a rare feat for child actors in horror: a lead who’s both emotionally credible and narratively indispensable, which is exactly what sets Barratt’s performance as Andy in Bring Her Back apart from a hundred whiny horror brats.
Piper: More Than a Device—Agency and Authenticity
Building a Character, Not a Symbol
With Sora Wong in the role, Piper finally gets to be something more than “the blind kid in peril.” Wong sidesteps all the “inspirational” landmines, giving us a character whose agency comes from stubbornness, not sentimentality. Piper makes decisions, challenges adults, and brings the sharpest skepticism to the room, despite—or maybe because of—her supposed vulnerability. Every choice feels grounded, never manufactured for audience sympathy, which is a relief for anyone tired of seeing visually impaired characters treated as plot devices.
Authenticity Over Tokenism: Why Sora Wong’s Performance Lands
What really anchors this role is how Wong navigates the push-pull between Piper’s limitations and her intelligence. There’s a quiet confidence at play—she doesn’t overplay trauma or milk her disability for gravitas. Instead, she stakes out a space for Piper’s agency, making her an active participant rather than a spectator in her own nightmare. This level of control and nuance in Wong’s performance is rare, especially for a debut. With Wong’s debut performance and her dynamic as Piper, the film dodges lazy representation and delivers something stubbornly authentic.
Oliver/Connor: The Kid You Can’t Pin Down
Possession as Performance: Jonah Wren Phillips and Ambiguity
Credit to Jonah Wren Phillips for pulling off a thankless task—playing a child who might be a demon, a victim, or both, sometimes in the same shot. His work is all in the margins: posture, breath, the weirdly vacant stare that dares the audience to guess what’s happening behind his eyes. There’s a welcome restraint here—no horror-movie mugging, no shrieking possession clichés—just mounting unease. It’s a tricky role to calibrate; too much, and it’s camp. Too little, and it’s background noise. Phillips walks the line with unsettling precision, keeping the character in a perpetual state of ambiguity.
When Horror Hides in the Gaps: Silence, Physicality, and the Unsaid
What makes Oliver/Connor work as an ambiguous character isn’t dialogue but negative space. The silences, the physical hesitations, the flickers of recognition that vanish before anyone can name them—this is how horror gets under the skin without shouting. For a film obsessed with possession and lost identity, this is a rare case where the performance does most of the narrative lifting. The result is a performance of a possessed child in Bring Her Back that’s quietly haunting, giving the film its most persistent sense of dread.
Story Unpacked: The Plot and Its Mechanics
The Setup: When Orphanhood and Grief Collide with Bureaucracy
The plot of Bring Her Back starts with a household that doesn’t get to finish breakfast. Andy and Piper, two kids clocking in extra hours as survivors, lose their father to a bathroom tragedy. No time for tears—the state steps in. With the kind of efficiency only government paperwork can provide, the siblings are shuffled into the foster care system, landing in the care of Laura, who talks like she wrote the manual on empathy. This isn’t a setup for redemption; it’s the opening note for foster care horror—one where the safety net is more noose than cushion.
The Descent: Domestic Disturbance and a House Full of Red Flags
From the first day, the atmosphere in Laura’s home runs on undertones and weird silences. Taxidermied pets, locked rooms, and a third kid—Oliver—who stares too much and speaks too little. Every interaction is a chess move; every room comes with a warning. Andy clocks the inconsistencies but is outnumbered by both adults and his own trauma. The movie’s narrative structure is tight, folding domestic discomfort into a claustrophobic spiral. By the time Piper begins to trust Laura, the audience already knows better. The full plot of Bring Her Back, explained up to the brink of the climax, is less a series of events, more a series of incremental boundary violations—each one making the house, and the audience, feel a little less safe.
Rituals, Boundaries, and the Mythos Engine
Drawing Lines: The Logic of Chalk Circles and Supernatural Lockdown
This film isn’t content to traffic in jump scares. Its brand of supernatural ritual horror is rooted in the mundane—white chalk circles, the kind a bored kid might draw, except these keep demonic visitors contained. The chalk circle mythology works like a supernatural firewall. The audience isn’t spoon-fed every rule, but the recurring visuals and reaction shots make it clear: cross the line, and the balance shifts. It’s a simple but potent trick for building tension—one that owes more to the logic of urban legends than to CGI-heavy franchises.
Resurrection on a Budget: Ritual Mechanics and Genre World-Building
The film’s horror lore borrows just enough from classic possession tales to be recognizable, then scrambles the formula. The resurrection ritual involves a mashup of body horror and metaphysical musical chairs—possession, consumption of remains, and the “host” being forced to cough up the dead. All of this is delivered in fragmented glimpses, never giving the audience the satisfaction of a rulebook. The brilliance of how Bring Her Back explains its supernatural rules is that it keeps the viewer guessing, creating unease without ever handing over a user manual.
The Twisty Bits: Plot-Driven Manipulation and Gaslighting
Domestic Warfare: Laura’s Gaslighting as Psychological Artillery
Laura doesn’t brandish knives; she manipulates reality. Her weapon of choice is gaslighting in horror, executed with a methodical calm that would impress any screen sociopath. Scenes are loaded with micro-manipulations—items moved, stories rewritten, children accused of infractions they didn’t commit. The film’s strength is how these moments build—not with big revelations, but with a dozen tiny cuts that isolate Andy and undermine his credibility.
Sleight of Hand: Visual and Structural Support for Manipulation
The camera plays accomplice, framing Andy as unreliable, forcing viewers to question what’s real and what’s orchestrated. This isn’t lazy misdirection; it’s plot manipulation that leans into the rhythms of a psychological thriller construction. The audience finds itself gaslit alongside the characters, stuck in a feedback loop of second-guessing. Every shot and edit pulls focus away from the supernatural, centering the horror squarely in manipulation and the breakdown of trust. The result: the psychological manipulation in Bring Her Back doesn’t need a boogeyman in the closet—just a well-placed lie at the kitchen table.
The Possession Reveal: How the Film Unmasks Its Haunted Child
Breadcrumbs and Red Herrings: The Construction of a Twist
The movie toys with expectations, sowing just enough clues for the audience to suspect Oliver is more than a socially awkward foster kid. Missing child posters, whispered names, scribbled notes—classic horror plot twists set up for delayed payoff. The film relies on performance and context, not expository monologues, to tease the possession reveal.
The Big Unmasking: When Horror and Tragedy Collide
The eventual revelation is both mechanical and emotional. The audience is forced to confront not just the supernatural angle, but the real horror of a missing child in horror narratives: the possibility that the haunted kid is a victim first, and a monster second. The structure keeps the tension high without ever tipping into melodrama. By the time the film lands its punchline, the reveal of Oliver’s identity in Bring Her Back feels less like a twist and more like a gut punch, perfectly integrated into the film’s clinical dissection of trauma and manipulation.
The Ending, Demystified: Climax and Consequences
Ritual Failure: The Poolside Showdown and Love’s Disruption
The so-called horror movie climax in Bring Her Back skips the fireworks and opts for slow-motion disaster. Laura’s plan for resurrection involves a possessed kid, a bowl of ashes, and a swimming pool—a DIY occult operation that looks less like black magic and more like a failed PTA meeting. The sequence is tense, not because of effects or music cues, but because every character is one mistake away from total ruin. The ritual breaks down fast: Andy fights for his sister, Piper resists drowning, and the demonic host starts to crack under the strain. This is a textbook ritual failure—nothing unfolds as intended, nobody achieves closure, and the rules that seemed ironclad dissolve in the chlorine fog that Bring Her Back’s pool scene leaves behind.
When Love Disrupts the Supernatural
The plan falls apart not because the occult is too complicated, but because Laura hesitates. As Piper, gasping, calls her “Mom,” Laura finally blinks. That pause—small but fatal—lets everything collapse. The demon’s transfer stalls, Piper survives, and the ritual, designed to restore order, delivers chaos. The pool ritual ending in Bring Her Back boils down to one point: when love interrupts fanaticism, even the supernatural runs out of steam.
Survivors and Fallout: Who Gets Out and What’s Left Behind
The Living: Who Survives the Mayhem
The aftermath is clinical. Andy, battered but breathing, is pulled from the yard by emergency responders. Piper, dazed and soggy, survives the ordeal thanks to an alert goalball coach who noticed the bruises and sounded the alarm. The kid formerly known as Oliver—now unmistakably Connor—finally escapes the house, stumbling past the chalk boundaries that had kept him prisoner. The film provides a clean record of character resolution for the three central figures.
Unpacking the Rescue: Who Is Freed and Who Is Left Broken
While most horror films leave their horror survivors with PTSD, Bring Her Back is less concerned with emotional fallout than pure logistics. Andy and Piper are physically safe, but the house’s spell isn’t completely broken. Connor is handed over to authorities as a missing child, his release as mechanical as his imprisonment. The movie outcomes are clear-cut: Piper and Andy make it out, Connor is freed, and no ambiguous fates are left hanging. The character survival in Bring Her Back’s ending offers a rare moment of clarity in a film obsessed with confusion.
Grief’s Final Act: Laura’s Last Swim and the Cost of Obsession
Laura’s Endgame: How Obsession Turns Inward
The last act for Laura isn’t loud. After her scheme crumbles, she gathers the remains of her lost daughter and heads straight for the water. Laura’s suicide scene is clinical, almost procedural: a woman finishing a checklist she’s rewritten in blood and grief. There’s no last speech, no camera lingering for audience tears—just a final, sinking embrace in the pool that started it all.
The Unraveling: When the Horror Turns on Its Creator
What matters is not just Laura’s death, but how calculated it feels. She orchestrates her final act in horror like a ritual with no audience, closing the book on her own story without fanfare. The obsessive energy that powered her turns in on itself, and the film’s closing image is not of evil defeated, but of a mother’s obsession left with no object. Laura’s final pool sequence in Bring Her Back is merciless in its precision: no redemption, no ambiguity, just the natural endpoint of a character who spent the entire film crossing lines nobody else could see.
Behind the Curtain: Technical & Artistic Analysis
Aesthetic Evolution: Direction, Cinematography, and Sound in Bring Her Back
What stands out first is the ruthless efficiency of the cinematography in this horror film. Every frame is designed to squeeze tension from the mundane. The camera hovers, lingers, then veers off just before any catharsis. Domestic spaces look sterile one second, hostile the next—credit to a director’s style that understands how to weaponize negative space. There are no grand flourishes, just a precise, surgical approach that lets anxiety pool in the corners of each scene. Even wide shots feel claustrophobic, the lens often framing its characters in doorways or between furniture, as if the house itself is setting the terms of engagement. This is visual language borrowed from Polanski, filtered through Australian daylight into pure unease.
Sound and Score: From Minimalism to Sonic Assault
Cornel Wilczek’s score is sparingly deployed—when it arrives, it’s more scalpel than sledgehammer. Silence does the heavy lifting, punctuated by sharp stings or a low electronic thrum that never resolves. The sound design is equally lean. Everyday noises—the hum of a fridge, the scrape of a chair—take on the threat level of a loaded gun. This restraint is exactly why the few moments of audio excess hit so hard. The film’s approach to aesthetics is less about spectacle and more about creating an ecosystem where every technical choice pushes the viewer a little further from comfort. In the end, the cinematography and sound design in Bring Her Back amounts to a masterclass in sustained, nerve-fraying tension.
Practical Effects and the Art of Disgust
Tactile Terror: The Case for Going Practical
Bring Her Back isn’t interested in CGI set pieces or digital bloodbaths. The film relies heavily on practical effects, from bodily contortions to unpleasant, sticky fluids that look like they’d stain forever. There’s a rawness to every transformation—possessions, injuries, and vomited-up trinkets all feel grounded in the real, not filtered through a computer. When the film does go for the jugular, it’s with old-school craftsmanship reminiscent of Cronenberg’s body horror. The gross-outs don’t come cheap—they’re tactile, immediate, and impossible to write off as mere spectacle.
Digital Augmentation: Where Effects Meet Restraint
Digital tricks are used, but sparingly. The few enhancements serve only to nudge the horror over the line when the practical approach can’t quite deliver. This discipline keeps the film’s special effects grounded. It resists the urge to show off, choosing to create a discomfort that lasts longer than any jump scare. The practical effects in Bring Her Back are simple: if there’s a gorehound in the audience, they’ll find little to nitpick—and more than a few moments to squirm.
Disability On Screen: Casting, Culture, and a Step Forward
Casting Without Compromise: When Representation Is More Than A Checkbox
The film’s approach to how disability is represented in horror doesn’t pander, and—miracle of miracles—doesn’t call attention to itself at every turn. Casting an actor with real lived experience in the role isn’t played for press or sympathy; it’s a narrative decision that actually enriches the story. There’s no “inspiration porn,” no grand declarations about overcoming adversity. Instead, the character is allowed to exist in the narrative with as much agency and complexity as anyone else, sidestepping the usual traps of tokenism.
Genre Growing Pains: Inclusion in a Traditionally Exclusive Space
Horror hasn’t exactly been known for leading the charge on authentic casting or for prioritizing inclusion in film. Bring Her Back represents a rare moment when representation moves beyond the margins. The presence of a fully realized disabled character in a genre film signals a broader shift—a recognition that horror can do more than recycle the same old archetypes. This isn’t just good optics; it’s good storytelling. The impact of Bring Her Back on disability casting in the industry will hopefully be felt outside the festival circuit, where representation isn’t a press release but a baseline expectation.
Verdict
Final Reckoning: For Whom Does This Movie Work?
The verdict for the dedicated horror audiences is both a dare and a warning. Anyone looking for high body counts, buckets of blood, or grindhouse camp will find Bring Her Back a little too interested in slow-burn dread and bureaucratic despair. The film is stingy with jump scares, far more invested in psychological lock-picking than jump-out-of-the-dark stunts. Still, there’s enough claustrophobia and threat for fans who get their thrills from discomfort rather than cheap spectacle. The movie reception in hardcore genre circles is likely to split between those who worship A24 slow-burns and those who miss the days when horror films actually wanted to be fun.
Bring Her Back Review: The Horror Audience Reaction in a Sentence
For the crowd that treats psychological trauma like a tasting menu, this is premium fare. The film’s psychological horror appeal is sharp-edged and merciless, offering zero catharsis and plenty of moments that feel like emotional waterboarding. Critics—especially those allergic to traditional horror tropes—will spot echoes of The Babadook and Hereditary, but filtered through a welfare-state nightmare. Casual viewers, however, may wonder if they’ve accidentally tuned into a social realist drama that moonlights as a possession flick.
So, who survives the screening? How horror audiences will react to Bring Her Back boils down to this: horror purists will bicker, critics will annotate, and anyone who’s ever dreaded a home visit from child protective services will never look at a pool the same way again.
Where to Watch
In Theaters
Release Date: May 30, 2025
Production Company: Causeway, Films RackaRacka, Studios SAFC Studios, Salmira Productions
Genres: Horror, Mystery
Website: a24films
SOURCES:
‘Bring Her Back,’ about sad orphans in danger, is alive with nasty, visceral thrills – Los Angeles Times, ‘Bring Her Back’ Directors Went To Extremes For The Nightmarish Horror – Forbes, ‘Bring Her Back’ Is the Perfect Kick-Off to Horror-Movie Summer – Vogue, Practical Magic: DP Aaron McLisky on Bring Her Back – Filmmaker Magazine, ‘Bring Her Back’ Review: A Foster Mother Like No Other – The New York Times, The Muddled Message of ‘Bring Her Back’ – The Atlantic.