Bring Her Back (Danny and Michael Philippou, 2025)

Well, the Philippou brothers really know how to make a horror film that's emotionally engaging. It’s clear now, their first film wasn’t a fluke of beginners luck. They didn’t stumble into the achievement of making an excellent debut film out of that odd luck that sometimes comes to those who don’t know any better and are fueled by enthusiasm and blissful ignorance.

Talk To Me was successful in both being superbly creepy, and emotionally compelling. So is Bring Her Back. These two, the Brothers Philippou, understand the meat and mechanics of the trade that is building a horror film that breaches the walls we erect around our fears, sneaking it in by way of a Trojan horse fashioned from empathy and compassion.

At some point, I assume we’ll learn why grief is such a screeching, thumping motivator in their storytelling, as both deal of their films with it, though they reach for different kinds of revelations, through different perspectives on it. 

Both films also center children and adolescents on the brink of adulthood, they demonstrate an emotional maturity and depth of understanding usually reserved for the kinds of intelligent, nuanced adult dramas that are rarely this well executed. The Philippou brothers grasp of the subtleties of dramatic storytelling is superb and confident. Mixing that as fine an understanding of the piercing shock of horror is a potent cocktail, delivering an experience only slightly less mind altering than booze. The horror of it all fills the space which too often fills with the maudlin and saccharine in dramas attempting to reach what Bring Her Back grasps.

The film also makes an interesting narrative decision in giving the audience two protagonists, and being about each of their journeys in equal measure. Through this, it illuminates a heartbreaking form of monstrousness. One of these characters commits a series of actions in service of a goal, the total sum of those actions and goal sincerely earn that rarely earned adjective (monstrous), but the way it serves the story is to create an aching empathy, entwined with the inevitable revulsion. This character isn’t a monster, as monstrous as their actions may be. This is a person overtaken, in a way possessed, and in their desperation to free themselves, the single mindedness of it, commits these monstrous acts against others. This thing they run from, tragic, heart rending and mind bending as it might be, is thoroughly human. In different forms, we all experience it. It touches all of us. It and how we react to or deal with it, shapes all of us somewhere along the way. We can't get through life without experiencing it in some form and degree.

In this, Bring Her Back follows in a tradition we find everywhere in storytelling, the human being who becomes the monster, attempting to escape their inescapable humanity. It is a tradition, a thing that stays with us in storytelling, because no matter what else changes in the world around us and how we organize it, this remains part of human behavior.  

One of the ways Bring Her Back succeeds in achieving this, is the sense of authenticity in everything that's on screen. It's a world we know and understand, where something we don't immediately understand, but will come to, is happening. Sally Hawkins as Laura, Billy Barrat as Andy and Sara Wong as Piper all bring this authentic quality to their characters. Hawkins and Barrat do the heavy lifting as the characters the film is most focused on, and they're both excellent. Hawkings character and work is memorable, and one of the best performances of the year. Beyond the actors, all of the environments are steeped in this sense of realism. They feel so authentically lived in that we shouldn't notice them as an audience, and in this film particularly, the degree of success in creating that effect is central to why it works as well as it does. The environments expertly convey the feeling of having been worn by living human beings inhabiting them, in the ways we do in real life, without the unearned sheen that is so often part of creating fictional universes on film and television. They are spaces used by average people, everyday, and when mixed with acting that feels as authentic, it elevates the impact of all that doesn't belong.

For me, the best of horror, like the work of Guillermo del Toro, doesn’t just seep blood. Though it may or may not be covered in blood, it is always drenched with a loving affection for humanity. It’s not the antiseptic observation of science. It’s an understanding that our monstrousness is a product of our inability to accept our humanity, as painful as that experience can be. This quality comes through in the Philippou brothers work and in pointed fashion in Bring Her Back. Many of us who make a habit of traveling the back roads and byways of storytelling embracing the darkness of humanity, do so because we know it is as influential and consequential in sculpting us as the light. We do this because we understand that to only look at, investigate, the ways the light shapes us would be both dishonest and incomplete. It's a way of bringing the light into the darkness to illuminate what's there, and how it's shapes all the things it does.

Artists like the Philippou brothers understand why tragedy is something human beings have retained in our storytelling for thousands of years, and that it, along with the exhilaration of the thrill, are the ancestors of modern horror.  We seem to collectively need these as part of the landscape of storytelling, so we dress them in new costumes, we adapt them to new contexts as time and technology change the world we live in, we give them new faces eerily similar to the faces in our lives or past. 

We should consider ourselves fortunate to have storytellers like them and their collaborators among us, because they are rare, no matter when or where we might live. Bring Her Back adds itself to the list of other films which have made 2025 a remarkable year for horror.