Bring Her Back (Danny & Michael Philippou, 2025)

[alacal2]

A24 teases Danny and Michael Philippou's Bring Her Back with Sally Hawkins and branded bowls.

Bring Her Back (Philippou Brothers) - the most unnerving film I've seen so far this year.

[Monterey Jack]

Bring Her Back (Philippou Brothers) - the most unnerving film I've seen so far this year.

I've developed a pretty strong stomach for horror films over my life, but there were multiple moments I was yelping out loud at what I witnessed in this. Truly disturbing stuff.

[The Curious Sofa]

'Bring Her Back' also really stuck with me. While grief has become a popular horror movie trope, it instrumentalises it with the same ferocity as Hereditary did.And it does so in the guise of a 'psycho biddy' film; it's most reminiscent of 'Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?', but with the gloves off. What is most upsetting is what happens to the children, especially when you discover the true identity of

Spoiler

Oliver and the last moment death of the main protagonist, a thoroughly good kid you've been rooting for the whole time. His death is devastating in a way that few horror movie deaths are.

The Philippou Brothers are among the most skillfull horror movie makers out there and its fascinating how they arrived there.

[Mr Sausage]

Just watched Talk to Me and Bing Her Back back to back, and while the first was a pretty good addition to horror-as-grief-exploration, which has become the main trope in mainstream horror films, Bring Her Back was something else. Even the former's willingness to take things to their logical, horrifying limit didn't prepare me for some of the stuff on display in the latter. Given the filmmakers' background in colourful, nerdy, over-the-top comedic youtube videos (which I had only a passing familiarity with) and their loud, zany personalities as seen in this bit of promotion for their first film, I wouldn't've thought this was the direction their career would go. But they're obviously complex individuals who've got a lot going on beneath the surface. While the pair's movies aren't quite as incisive or layered as Ari Aster's or David Robert Mitchell's, two of the best working in this horror vein, the Philippou brothers stand out for the intensity and ferocity (good word, Curious Sofa) of their output. Bring Her Back in particular is an agonized scream of a movie. It's only barely holding itself together until shattering at the end, much like its characters.

I can see these films being polarizing, but I'm excited for what the pair do next. They're effective filmmakers.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I'm glad I watched this at home rather than in the dark of the cinema where I'd have squirmed a lot more. Sally Hawkins is excellently cast against type and her shifts of tone in character from matey/slightly dorky to more malevolent are well handled. The two actors playing Piper and Oliver are really good considering it's, I think, their first films? It probably has the creepiest VHS cassette tape since The Ring.