If you’ve seen Talk to Me, the 2023 debut feature from Australian twin-brother directors Danny and Michael Philippou about a viral parlor game gone terribly wrong, you may find yourself comparing it to the Philippous’ follow-up, Bring Her Back. The films were written at “the exact same time,” according to Danny (who co-wrote both scripts with Bill Hinzman), and speak to the real-life grief resulting from the death of the Philippous’ cousin’s 2-year-old. Both movies’ plots involve horrific attempts at resurrecting the dead fueled by a desperation in the characters that curdles into selfishness. But as brutal as Talk to Me was—one possessed character was made to repeatedly bang his head against hard surfaces before attempting to rip out his own eyeball—Bring Her Back makes it look like kid stuff. The games are over.
And whereas Talk to Me articulated its rules clearly (a spirit possesses those who hold an embalmed hand and say “Talk to me,” leaving no ill or lasting effects as long as the channeling ends before 90 seconds is up), Bring Her Back is a bit more vague about what’s going on—which makes it all the scarier.

Bring Her Back splits open the domestic thriller subgenre, turns it inside out, and beckons us to admire its grisly innards. A typical domestic thriller—The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Good Son—finds a family unit in peril as the result of an invading entity. The mother figure is the gaslit hero who is tasked with triumphing over evil to keep her family intact. The mother in Bring Her Back, on the other hand, has already seen her small unit ripped apart: Her daughter is dead. Laura (Sally Hawkins at her best) attempts to put it back together at the expense of another family, or what’s left of it: half-siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (newcomer Sora Wong), who recently lost their father.

Laura takes in Andy and Piper as a package deal—Andy is just a few months shy of 18, and though troubled, is the caretaker of his sister, who is mostly blind (“I can only see shapes and light,” she explains) and something of an outcast at school. (Wong, who herself is visually impaired, makes an astonishing screen debut.) Laura’s recently deceased daughter Cathy was also blind, and so it would seem Laura is perfectly suited to foster Piper. But almost immediately, it is clear that Laura’s home is no safe haven. She lies to Piper, exploiting her blindness, and gaslights Andy, pouring urine on him while he’s sleeping to make him think he’s wet the bed. She shares her house with another troubled, rageful adoptee, the selectively mute Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), whom she treats less like a child than like a savage animal that needs to be crated. Her scheming makes Bring Her Back function like an inverse Orphan, and you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a cinematic parental figure as diabolical—at least not since Mommie Dearest. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Philippous have cited “psycho biddy” or “hagsploitation” cinema like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? as inspiration.)

Exactly what Laura is doing is left unclear for much of Bring Her Back, and even after completing the movie, many viewers will have questions. The Philippous draw us in with a seemingly straightforward story about fostering featuring a completely pure protagonist (Piper) who must be protected and survive for there to be any justice in this universe. But as the plot progresses, they scatter a bunch of narrative dots for audiences to connect to make sense of the depth of the danger that Piper and her brother face. Laura studies VHS tapes depicting what seems to be a cult ritual for raising the dead. In addition to kooky-aunt vibes (giant sunglasses, big hoop earrings at Andy and Piper’s father’s funeral), Laura is obviously in the middle of carrying out an elaborate ceremony that we rightly assume from the title of this movie involves bringing back her daughter. At that funeral, she insists Andy kiss his father’s corpse on the lips (“It’s custom”), and when he refuses, she does it for him. She also steals some of the corpse’s hair. In order to carry out her task, she resorts to abuse. She gets Andy drunk and then uses his alcohol-induced confessions about being beaten by his late father against him. She hits Piper and blames it on Andy. Her behavior is as riveting as it is abhorrent. Hawkins wears Laura’s sadness like a mourning veil. No matter what she’s doing, you can see that she’s doing it out of a frantic need to control the uncontrollable. In a way, the exact nuts and bolts of her process are immaterial, for she is bound to fail to some extent. In horror, reviving the dead is almost never a straightforward endeavor. That zombie that was your loved one is inevitably no longer your loved one. You pay for your hubris in the end. Laura’s invested effort is a way of her doing something with the grief that would otherwise fester in her—and, well, we do all grieve in different ways.

Hawkins’ performance is the rotten heart and spoiled soul of the movie, but the performances are great across the board, and stronger than usually seen in horror, be it of the “elevated” variety or otherwise. Of particular note is Phillips, whose Oliver is an embodiment of malevolence. Much like Alien, Bring Her Back simmers quietly for most of its first half, relying on creeping dread, before bursting forth into violence. If you’ve ever wondered what chewing on a knife (blade pointed down) would be like, well, this movie has the answer for you. The self-harm inflicted by Oliver, who also bites chunks out of a wooden table, seeming to relish the splinters, is not just horrifying; it will lodge itself under your skin and stay there.

Once it gets going, Bring Her Back, like Talk to Me, refuses relief. This is not a movie that is precious about the well-being of the people it has made you care about. Those people include Laura, and among the most daring of choices here is challenging the audience to consider the internal life of someone who is abusive. In a sense, she is even allowed a wish of hers to come true by the end of the movie. By making Laura’s sorrow so specific (as opposed to generic horror trauma), and hiring an actor who can bring it to life, the Philippous pull this off. It’s an open question as to what audiences will make of such a bleak movie. Bring Her Back is an unpleasant experience by design, eschewing any bit of fun that Talk to Me offered. With nearly $100 million in worldwide ticket sales, that one became the highest-grossing A24 horror movie of all time, surpassing even Hereditary. Bring Her Back is a much rougher watch, yet because of its mysteries, it practically demands repeat viewing. One of the great advantages of making sister pictures as their debut and sophomore outings is it allows us to watch the directors progress. The bolder, more self-assured, and more moving Bring Her Back has all the signs of a growth spurt.