‘Bring Her Back’ is a battle between real and symbolic grief

Set in South Australia, the story follows teenage step-siblings Piper (Sora Wong) and Andy (Billy Barratt), who come home to discover Andy’s father in the shower from an apparent overdose. Piper is visually impaired, and feels her way around the flooded bathroom floor to perform CPR amidst a mix of vomit and other bodily fluids. The film is gross right out the gate, but roots its visceral discomforts in human drama. Andy, meanwhile, is too shocked by the sight of his father’s body to respond. Now orphaned, they’re placed with an enthusiastic foster mother, Laura (Sally Hawkins), a kindly woman quietly grieving her own loss while raising a third, mysteriously mute foster child, 10-year-old Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips).

The silent, looming presence of their new sibling is just the tip of the eerie iceberg for Piper and Andy. Strange happenings around Laura’s home seem to drive a wedge between them, resulting in truly captivating character drama as the movie builds its more genre-forward twists and turns in the background. Laura—sweet as she may seem—tends to lock Oliver in his room, and acts out against Andy when Piper is out of sight. She also turns to disturbing VHS tapes of cult-like rituals for comfort, hinting at something more sinister in the wings.

The movie’s heart and soul is the relationship between Piper and Andy, which, from the word go, features all the complexity of real siblings who get on each other’s nerves, but understand each other intimately. Andy, who’s a few years older and fully sighted, takes it upon himself to protect Piper, but the duo are constantly bickering and throwing insults each other’s way. Their loving banter gives way to rigorous drama when they suddenly find themselves in the throes of inexplicable grief. It’s hard not to love them, and even harder not to feel terrified that a manipulative parent figure might get in the way of their dynamic. In a story told by a sibling duo, the stakes couldn’t be higher. 

Hawkins is masterfully creepy as Laura, but not for the reasons you may have come to expect from a genre filled with moms-gone-crazy. She delivers a no-frills, naturalistic performance so steeped in loss that no matter what bizarre turns the movie takes, her character feels completely realistic, and utterly compelling. As a mother to a blind girl who died tragically, Laura sees her own daughter in Piper and takes an instant liking to her. This also explains her dislike for Andy (who was forced upon her by the foster system), and imbues even her most rankled moments with recognizable humanity. The trio’s uneasy dynamic is riveting to watch. You’d be forgiven for occasionally forgetting that Bring Her Back is primarily a genre piece, and that the wide-eyed Oliver—with his lingering stares, and penchant for biting household objects until his gums bleed—is waiting to go off like some voracious time bomb.

In fact, the movie tends to stray from its thematic course whenever it veers headfirst into traditional horror territory. Its story is primarily about grief, the different ways it manifests, and the way it can consume people. But this straightforward emotional foundation is complemented by a symbolic streak, rife with heavy-handed metaphors for all the aforementioned ideas, albeit in ways that don’t fully connect. As adept as the young Phillips may be at playing the strange, silent, sometimes-sympathetic homunculus Oliver, the character is more of a distraction to the story, rather than a terrifying embodiment of its ugliest emotions—as its directors seem to intend. Without giving too much away: Oliver is the center of the movie’s most gut-churning moments, but he’s also thematically disconnected from its central idea of loss. He’s a conduit of sorts, for Laura’s strange methods of confronting her grief, but that’s all the movie ever lets him be. 

Given how much of the plot turns on the great unknowns surrounding Oliver, Bring Her Back often loses emotional momentum. While its audio-visual unpleasantness makes a great endurance test for willing viewers—seriously, it’s gnarly—these moments exist parallel to the more heart-wrenching story of Piper and Andy being driven apart in the wake of their grief. The two threads are seldom entwined. 

The filmmakers attempt to embody Piper’s perspective in fleeting moments, focusing on the objects and surfaces she touches to get around while leaving spaces out of sight. It’s a nice flourish, even if it doesn’t really inform the way the story is told. However, Wong, who shares her character’s disability, delivers a radiant performance, and the threat of her character’s incandescence being snuffed out is key to why even the softest of horror viewers are likely to put up with the more squirm-inducing scenes. Similarly, Barratt adds layers of complexity to Andy that make him a truly fascinating, rage-filled character, who deals with grief at its most unpredictable (there are moments when Bring Her Back resembles the grief-centric drama Manchester by the Sea more than it does a horror film). However, in its pursuit of crafting unnerving imagery, the movie tends to sideline these more human elements and relationships.

This results in its story taking a backseat, in a favor of supernatural horror mechanics that—although rattling when they’re first revealed—subsume the entire narrative by the end. The movie’s chilling, intentionally revolting metaphors for grief slowly push its real story of grieving characters off screen, leading to a final act that places more value on horror as a genre of symbols as an end-goal, rather than one where symbolism is an avenue to greater, more terrifying truths about how grief can contort even the best of us.