Bring Her Back review: a rivetingly terrifying tragedy

When we learn geometry at school, we’re told that a circle has no sides. But it’s not true.

For as long as humanity has walked this earth, we have understood that when you peer through this arc of infinity, there is our ‘side’ and what lies beyond. Harness the auld magic at your peril and a chalk circle drawn can pierce the veil between realms.

Enfants terrible Adelaide filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou understand this. They shook the world with their 2022 Sundance hit debut Talk to Me and open their astonishingly accomplished second feature, Bring Her Back, with just such a portal, etched in bone-white on the floor of a dark and forsaken place.

ScreenHub: Talk to Me review: an Australian horror to possess you

We perceive, in scuzzy Ringu-recalling VHS snippets, a corpulently naked man stride across the circle’s powerful boundary to place his hand upon the head of a frantic younger woman. Shadowy figures mutter, in Russian, what appears to be a summoning.

Returning cinematographer Aaron McLisky artfully breaks this barrier in a nimble manoeuvre, as his much crisper camera picks up the shot from an older woman recording the ceremony on camcorder. Through this fourth-wall-breaking handover, the audience phases between worlds, from the film within a film to the one the Philippous are spinning.

ScreenHub: Danny and Michael Philippou on their spooky new movie Bring Her Back

Bring Her Back: the looking glass

McLisky captures another fateful crossing as Andy (tousle-mopped Invasion star Billy Barrat, an English actor affecting an impressive Aussie accent) and his younger step-sister Piper (brilliant newcomer Sora Wong) unwittingly step over a painted white line obscured by autumnal leaves. We also witness this passage through a rust-coloured circular sculpture as a woozy Dutch angle tips the camera to one side.

Watch the Bring Her Back trailer.

The perimeter encircles the remote and architecturally cool woodland home of foster carer Laura (Sally Hawkins). The new orphans wind up after their cancer-survivor father grimly dies in a tragic accident, negotiating with brusque but well-meaning social worker Wendy (Wentworth star Sally-Anne Upton) to be placed together until Andy can apply for guardianship when he turns 18 in three months.

Piper is legally blind, perceiving only shapes and blurring colours. A smart kid bristling with independence who loves her bro with all her might, but will hang shit on him if he dares mollycoddle her. You’d be forgiven for thinking they’re in safe hands with Laura clad in cosy knits and bopping to pop when they arrive at her door. But this is a Philippou film with the Hansel and Gretel vibes firing.

It becomes clear, comically underlined by a poorly angled selfie, that Laura’s only interested in Piper, who reminds her of her dead daughter Cathy (Mischa Heywood in flashbacks).

Irked by Andy’s intrusion, Laura has no problem breaking boundaries, snatching his phone to pry through his messages and grinning with passive aggression as she accuses his body language of being too defensive.

When Andy does lose his cool, Laura’s nefarious game sets in motion as she sneakily attempts to drive a wedge between him and Piper, their bond tested when their trust behind their safe word – grapefruit – is broken.

Then there’s the not inconsequential matter of the other foster kid in Laura’s dubious care. We first meet oddball Ollie, uncannily portrayed by buzz-headed actor Jonah Wren Phillips (How to Make Gravy), in another cracking McLisky shot as the camera soars up over Andy’s shoulders to reveal the younger lad wrestling with distressed a cat Junk Man at the centre of an empty triangular swimming pool.

Ollie is allegedly selectively mute, but nothing quite adds up. Why does Laura all but ignore him, oft-locking the restless and increasingly feral child outside or behind closed doors? Why is she more concerned with her eerily stuffed dead dog than Ollie or the cruelly monikered Junk Man? Why haven’t Andy and Piper already run for their lives??

On our side of the circle, Laura appears as a kindly steward. But cross the threshold, and behind that mask lies dangerous despair, her feigned jolliness all the more terrifying as she rocks cloistered in her bedroom, studying that cursed video.

Every fibre of our body tells us that this is not right. That no amount of irresponsible drinking sessions or wearing zany purple cardigans and 80s bangle earrings to their father’s funeral can lower these red flags. Skin-piercing needle drops from The Veronicas, Daddy Cool and Shannon Noll are similarly perverted.

Bring Her Back: monstrous

If there were any justice in the world this side of the circle, Hawkins would secure her third Oscar nomination for her agonising turn as Laura, our Lady Macbeth, turned by grief into something monstrous. A performance for the ages, hers is as devastatingly sad as it is repugnant, harnessing the obsession of Donald Sutherland’s John Baxter in Don’t Look Now and spinning it into a maelstrom.

Once again co-written by Danny with Bill Hinzman, the film burns this shortbread house down, ablaze with the crackle of Emma Bortignon’s awfully good sound design that’s somehow even scarier than the ensuing body horror we bear witness to, unleashed by maniacal prosthetics designer Larry Van Duynhoven and Tim Riach’s special effects.

In a uniformly excellent ensemble, Phillips is also uncanny as the snarling Ollie, all bursting blood vessels flooding those striking eyes. A pawn drawn down into Laura’s inexorable spiral towards the gates of hell, momentarily glimpsed in the mist of rain and steamy bathrooms, through the broken shards of windows and mirrors.

Wong, too, lends incredible strength to Piper in a screen debut that promises great work to come, and Barrat impeccably captures that crackling moment between lost boy and impossible adulthood, battling his hormones as something much worse crawls its way up.

Bring Her Back roars across this abyss, where the monumental folly of humanity is more frightening than the demons beyond. A chasm in which, if promised the return of a lost love by darkly whispering forces, perhaps we might all turn.

As the circle ever tightens – in the hollow of a rotting eye socket, a finger tracing a burning forehead, something wicked on the rim of a water bottle or a bloody hand windmilling around a window – beware! The Philippous will drag you right through.

Bring Her Back is in cinemas from 29 May 2025.