Studio:   A24
Director: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Writer:   Danny Philippou, Bill Hinzman
Producer: Samantha Jennings, Kristina Ceyton
Stars:    Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips, Sally-Anne Upton, Stephen Phillips, Mischa Heywood, Sally Hawkins

Review Score:

Summary:

Orphaned stepsiblings uncover horrifying secrets hidden in the home of their manipulative new foster mother.

Synopsis:

After their father Phil suffers a gruesome death in the shower, 17-year-old Andy and his partially blind stepsister Piper learn from social worker Wendy that they are to be split up, with Piper going to live with new foster mother Laura while Andy is sent elsewhere due to undisclosed problems in his past. Intent on assuming guardianship of Piper, whom he dutifully protects, when he turns 18 in three months, Andy manages to convince Wendy and Laura not to separate the siblings.

Andy and Piper move into Laura’s remote home. In identifying similarities between the two girls, Laura reveals she had a blind daughter, Cathy, who drowned in the pool outside. The siblings also meet a mute boy, Oliver, whom Laura claims is her curly, red-haired son even though his head is shaved.

Andy and Laura have a tense exchange when Andy catches the woman snooping through his text messages. At night, Andy spies Laura escorting Ollie to a shed outside. When he wakes the following morning, Andy sees his pants are wet from urine.

Laura takes Andy and Piper to their father Phil’s funeral. When no one is looking, Laura cuts off a lock of Phil’s hair. She then tries forcing Andy to kiss his father on the lips, which causes Andy to have an anxiety attack.

Home alone, Ollie breaks through a glass window to get outside. Unable to get inside the locked shed, Ollie goes to a nearby coop where he stares strangely at chickens he later devours raw.

Wanting to do something celebratory following the funeral, Laura has Andy and Piper get drunk with her at home. Once Piper is asleep, Laura reveals Wendy told her the secret about how Andy once hit Piper deliberately when he was eight years old. Andy admits he was previously jealous of Piper because his father was affectionate toward her and abusive toward him. After Andy passes out, Laura soaks his pants in her urine so he continues thinking his trauma is making him wet the bed.

While Laura gives Ollie a bath, the bathroom faucet suddenly turns on. Ollie’s eyes then turn red and a mirror shatters.

While Laura and Piper are out shopping, Andy unlocks Ollie from his room and brings the bizarre boy to the kitchen to try to get him to talk. Andy is horrified when Ollie begins forcefully gnawing on the sharp blade of a large kitchen knife that disfigures his mouth. Andy rushes Ollie outside to go for help, but the boy collapses in convulsions when he gets close to a white line that encircles the house. Ollie mutters, “Help me” just as Laura arrives to frantically rush the boy back inside. Andy notices that before the commotion, Ollie wrote the word “bird” on a notepad in the kitchen.

Laura stops Ollie’s shrieking by mimicking actions from a Russian videotape of an occult ritual featuring a similar boy possessed by the same demon that now possesses Ollie. Laura also feeds Ollie the lock of hair she stole at the funeral.

Haunted by a vision of his father while showering, Andy slips, hits his head, and is subsequently rushed to a hospital. When Laura visits him later, Andy warns her to keep Piper out of the rain because the vision warned him, “She’ll die in the rain.” Laura tells Andy he is merely associating his father’s shower death with water. When she returns home, Laura takes Piper outside to play in the rain.

Following a tender moment of watching home movies of Cathy together, Laura asks Piper to continue living with her even after her brother turns 18 and applies for legal guardianship. Piper disappoints Laura by deflecting the suggestion and declining to call her “mum.” Exploiting her blindness, Laura has Piper caress the decaying corpse of her daughter Cathy that she keeps in a floor freezer in the shed.

Andy returns to the house. Wearing Andy’s body spray to smell like him, Laura violently strikes Piper in her face while the girl sleeps to make it look as though Andy attacked her. The next morning, an argument over Piper’s black eye leads to Laura disclosing the parental abuse Andy kept secret from Piper, prompting a frustrated physical altercation between Andy and Laura. Their confrontation is interrupted by the sight of Ollie standing entranced in the rain.

Unable to pry Piper away from Laura, Andy goes alone to report Laura to social worker Wendy. While waiting in Wendy’s office, Andy notices a missing persons flyer for a 10-year-old boy named Connor Bird with Ollie depicted in the photograph.

Laura returns home to find Ollie trashing the house while in a feral state. Laura locks herself in a room and collapses after the boy violently attacks her by biting flesh from her forearm.

Initially dismissive of Andy’s accusations due to Laura’s preemptive countercomplaints and the fact that Laura previously worked with her as a counselor for 20 years, Wendy begins taking Andy’s claim that Laura kidnapped Connor Bird seriously when she associates the name Ollie with Laura’s red-headed nephew. Meanwhile, after more repulsive behavior from the possessed boy, Ollie begins eating Cathy’s frozen corpse as part of the process for resurrecting the dead girl.

Andy leaves a voicemail for his sister apologizing for shielding her from the truth about their abusive father. He also admits he struck Piper when he was younger, but he insists Laura is truly hateful and dangerous. Laura intercepts the message, which alerts her to Wendy’s imminent arrival.

While Wendy goes inside the house to investigate, Andy sneaks into the shed where he finds Ollie, fully possessed by the demon, eating Cathy’s corpse. Alarmed by Andy’s screams, Wendy becomes suspicious of Laura. Laura tries pleading with Wendy that Ollie is going to help her bring back Cathy.

After showing her the horror show in the shed, Andy tries fleeing with Wendy, but Laura strikes them both with her speeding vehicle. Wendy dies. Laura finishes off Andy by drowning him in a shallow rain puddle.

Laura hurriedly picks up Piper from a rec center to bring her home. A series of odd events causes Piper to become suspicious of Laura before finding her brother’s dead body. In response to Piper’s question about what happened to Andy, Laura cryptically claims she spoke with an angel she put inside Ollie, and now the angel is going to help put Cathy inside Piper after Laura drowns her in the same pool where Cathy died. Piper tries fighting her way free from Laura, but she falls unconscious.

Laura drags Piper to the pool during a rainstorm. His belly bloated, Ollie joins them in the water. Laura begins drowning Piper until the girl manages to shout “mum” like Cathy used to call her. Ollie attacks Piper, but she gets away to flag down a passing car. Prevented from following her by the white line on the ground, Ollie collapses and begins writhing and screaming.

Police later find Ollie reverted to his fully human form. Ollie identifies himself as Connor Bird. The police then find Laura lying motionless as she cradles Cathy’s corpse in the pool.

Review:

Anytime a debut feature bursts out of the gate with haunting horror that hits as hard as “Talk to Me,” acclaim initiates cautious questions about what comes next. Are these filmmakers the real deal or was that a one-time strike of lightning? Is a follow-up film doomed no matter what due to increased awareness attracting more critical voices? Is it even possible to equal, let alone top, the previous film under the pressure of heightened expectations brought on by success?

Two movies might be too early to unanimously acknowledge directing duo Danny and Michael Philippou as modern masters of the genre. At a minimum, however, their sophomore effort “Bring Her Back” shows an emerging pattern that’s definitively establishing the brothers as unique cinematic storytellers with exceptional skills for weaving skin-crawling scares into heart-wrenching human drama to create creepers that are viscerally frightening as well as cerebrally disturbing.

As they did in “Talk to Me,” Danny and Michael Philippou, along with returning co-writer Bill Hinzman, work with familiar themes and beats in “Bring Her Back,” yet they add small pinches of spice to basic building blocks, so any vanilla flavors are always accented by tasty toppings. “Bring Her Back” follows 17-year-old Andy and his younger sister Piper. With his dour demeanor and messy hair under his hoodie, Andy initially looks like a stereotypically troubled teenager who is overprotective of Piper. Except the two of them are technically stepsiblings, and Piper suffers from partial blindness, two facts that come to play important parts in their dynamic and in how the two of them operate around one another.

Their lives change significantly when Andy and Piper’s dad dies in the shower. His accidental death isn’t straightforward either. Piper may have the mercy of blindness, but Andy has to soak in the sight of their naked father with his head smashed on the bathroom floor, vomit congealing in his chest hair and a pained expression frozen on his face. This is just the first of several uncomfortable visuals “Bring Her Back” forces viewers to face in tandem with the characters, yet they’re always presented with deliberate purpose, not as empty jolts jammed in as unearned jump scares.

Since Andy isn’t old enough to be her legal guardian yet, he and Piper are sent to live with Laura, a mourning mother who sees Piper as a surrogate for her own blind daughter Cathy, who tragically drowned in the backyard pool. Laura would rather not see Andy at all, so she begins a string of manipulative moves to amplify Andy’s trauma and further cloud his muddled mind.

In a more milquetoast production, Laura might have been stamped from a standard “wicked stepmother” mold, if not for Sally Hawkins’ terrifically nuanced portrayal. Swirling equal parts of sympathetic and sinister into a compelling persona always teetering uncertainly between sweet and sociopathic, Hawkins exemplifies how perfectly identified actors, including newcomer Sora Wong as Piper, create grounded characters that feel natural despite their placement in supernatural circumstances. Once more, “Bring Her Back” boosts itself above convention not necessarily by being unconventional, but by turning tropes and tricks slightly enough that they can be seen from asymmetrical angles.

Laura isn’t the only person behaving bizarrely in her remote home. There’s also Ollie, Laura’s mute son. His odd actions include staring at live chickens as though he desires to devour them raw, standing in strange trances, and engaging in shocking scenes of tooth trauma guaranteed to make even the sternest stomach recoil in repulsion. Illustrating how cleverly they can tune their cast to the right notes, the Philippous pull a chilling portrayal out of young Jonah Wren Phillips that’s eerily unlike the usual “possessed kid” archetype.

Whether they’re tapping into occult associations with an underground VHS video rivaling “The Ring” for its ability to be unnerving, or gradually turning up the heat on simmering suspense, Danny and Michael Philippou excel at establishing unsettling textures. Like “Talk to Me” before it, what “Bring Her Back” does well is it generates dread without relying on unmotivated atmosphere to make meandering look like it has illusory meaning. This movie is moody, yet a distinct narrative also makes it meaty, whereas many films whose hooks stem solely from ambiguous ambiance open themselves to interpretation because they don’t have a firm leg of fiction to stand on. Bringing it back to the pattern identified earlier, what this duo does perhaps better than anyone is building stable bridges between arthouse artistry and mainstream accessibility to make movies that scratch both itches.

Continuing to say more about the story might spoil “Bring Her Back’s” secrets. Saying more about the movie’s qualities might pile up redundant praise on a point that’s satisfactorily been made. Suffice to say, “Bring Her Back” is another stellar example of Danny and Michael Philippou’s seemingly innate gift for being stylish without overindulging on unnecessary flair, being gruesome without gratuitous gore, and using indecipherable sounds and suggestive zooms to light slow burns that satisfyingly singe into fiery payoffs. “Bring Her Back” is a movie whose imagery sticks in your head, whose heavy treatises on grieving sharply puncture your heart, and whose tangible terrors tie knots in your gut; and all of those uneasy feelings linger in your body long after end credits conclude.

Review Score: 80