After Danny and Michael Philippou’s electrifying debut Talk To Me (2022) redefined possession horror with its brilliant blend of anxiety and supernatural dread, anticipation for their follow-up reached considerable heights (at least they did for me). Bring Her Back shoulders the burden of that promise—and unfortunately, shows just how tough it can be to follow a breakthrough first film.
The film opens with devastating efficiency: siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) discover their father’s lifeless body on the shower floor, a moment that immediately establishes the grief-based foundation upon which everything else will rest. Their subsequent navigation of the foster care system —with Andy counting the days until his 18th birthday so he can care for Piper himself—feels authentically fraught. When they land with Laura (Sally Hawkins), a woman drawn to fostering Piper specifically because of her blindness (mirroring her own late daughter’s condition), the stage seems set for another psychologically complex horror experience.
Hawkins, unsurprisingly, elevates every scene she inhabits. If I’m still comparing Talk To Me with Bring Her Back, this is the one area where Bring Her Back feels like the A24 treatment is a luxurious upgrade. Her performance as Laura makes use of the script’s few-and-far between character building moments, but still manages to carry the particular ache of maternal loss with the kind of lived-in authenticity. Both Barratt and Wong deliver performances that transcend typical genre expectations, finding emotional truth even as the material around them begins to wobble.
But it’s precisely when Bring Her Back moves away from these character foundations that it loses its footing. The issue begins to peak through in the second act, where the lore and “horror rules” for the game are somehow both dwelled on and left completely ambiguous. In the film’s third act act, Hawkins’ stellar performance can’t save the bizarre progression and leaps her character makes for the sake of getting to the ending – an ending that feels focused on the destination of Hawkins character, rather than the journey.
In addition to the strange pacing for the film and this particular character, as the film progresses, it also leans more on what turns out to be its primary scare function: body horror. While Talk To Me built genuine scares through innovative supernatural mechanics and social dynamics, this follow up effort feels like it’s traded intensity for impact. The film increasingly relies on visceral body horror that feels less like psychological enhancement and more like substitution.
This isn’t to dismiss body horror as a legitimate cinematic tool. Films like Julia Ducournau’s Titane demonstrate how physical extremity can serve deeper thematic purposes. While body horror can enhance an otherwise compelling narrative, in Bring Her Back it feels like it was the only thing on the menu. More troubling still is how predictable much of the film becomes; plot points reveal themselves with disappointing clarity, leaving viewers squirming as they wait for inevitable beats rather than experiencing genuine surprise or dread.
Bring Her Back unfortunately joins the growing roster of A24 grief-horror films that feel more derivative than innovative. The film especially feels like it pulls both in tone and tenor from A24 predecessor Hereditary (ironic, given how much Hereditary has borrowed from other films). While the studio’s commitment to elevated genre filmmaking has produced genuine masterpieces, it’s also created a template that yields diminishing returns. The film’s exploration of loss and family bonds carries emotional weight, but these themes feel borrowed rather than earned.
The disappointment isn’t that Bring Her Back is irredeemably bad—it’s that glimpses of the Philippou brothers’ genuine talent still shine through, particularly in their direction of the young performers and their ability to create atmospheric dread in quieter moments. But those flashes only highlight how far the film falls from the promise of their debut.
Bring Her Back underscores that exceptional filmmaking requires more than replicating successful formulas—and sometimes, the most troubling thing about a film is recognizing what it could have been.