Film Review: Bring Her Back

Welcome back to the blog readers. As you may know by now, I have a very conceited relationship with horror films. Some are good, some are terrible, but the ones that are great are special. 2024 was a great year for horror but 2025 is shaping up to be an even better one with some great ones like The Monkey, Sinners, and Final Destination Bloodlines (all 2025) out now, and films like 28 Years Later, M3GAN 2.0, Weapons, HIM, Together, The Long Walk, and Black Phone 2 (all 2025) on the way. Can we continue on the right track with this film? Stick around to find out.

Bring her back was directed by Danny and Michael Philippou from a screenplay by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman. The film stars Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Sally Hawkins, Jonah Wren Phillips, and Sally-Anne Upton. In the film, two siblings still grieving the loss of their father are sent to live with a former counselor, only to realize that they were put in the middle of an occult ritual to bring their foster mother's daughter back from the dead.

Horror films that deal with the occult are definitely ones that have my attention because they can play into a lot of religious allegories and they usually say something about grief and trauma to boot. And based on the plot description I gave in the last paragraph, I believe this film does a masterful job of bringing tension throughout the runtime of the film. Sally Hawkins delivers a genuinely terrifying and brilliant performance and some of the things that happen in the film even had me wincing.

I want to start by taking about the performance of Sally Hawkins as Laura. Hawkins has never been known to partake in the horror genre that much being in films like Godzilla, Paddington (both 2014), Paddington 2, The Shape of Water (both 2017) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). But there is a transformation that she undergoes in this film that makes her more deranged and terrifying than anything I have ever seen her in. You can feel the grief when she is mourning her daughter. You can feel the danger when she is scheming to do something dastardly. Hawkins give a career-best performance in this film and I can only hope she will continue to do horror because she was born to play roles like this.

I next want to talk about the themes of guilt and trauma. I can understand why all the horror films use grief and trauma as themes because they are so easy to tap into. Directors Danny and Michael Philippou do a great job of bringing these themes to the forefront through all of their characters. There's Andy and Piper, who are grieving the loss of their father. And then we have Laura who is grieving the loss of her daughter. All of these characters deal with these emotions in a different way, and getting to see how is probably the most fascinating part of this entire film.

And finally I want to talk about the tone of the film. The tone is set very early when the first images we get from the opening involve an occult ritual of some kind. What a way to present a dark and brooding atmosphere throughout, and it continues to resonate throughout the runtime of the film even through the lighter moments. For example, the scene after the funeral in which Andy, Laura, and Piper get drunk and party is a perfect example of this. It is meant to be a lighter moment but knowing the moody atmosphere we have been introduced to produces a dark undertone that stays through all the weird and creepy shit as well.

In conclusion, Bring Her Back showcases a stellar Sally Hawkins with a moody atmosphere and all the gore you could possibly imagine. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you for the next post.