Movie Review: BRING HER BACK

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 30th, 2025 / 03:51 AM

BRING HER BACK movie poster | © 2025 A24

Rating: R
Stars: Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Sally Hawkins, Jonah Wren Phillips, Mischa Heywood, Sally-Anne Upton, Stephen Phillips
Writers: Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman
Directors: Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou
Distributor: A24
Release Date: May 30, 2025

BRING HER BACK begins with a jolting sequence in a filthy room, where people are being tortured and murdered. A woman with a video camera calmly wanders through the chaos, recording the goings-on.

We gradually find out what bearing this has on the main action in BRING HER BACK. We meet young step-siblings Piper (Sora Wong) and Andy (Billy Barratt) at a bus stop, where Piper is attempting to chat to some other girls her age. Piper is about twelve, cheerful, and blind. Andy is three months away from his eighteenth birthday, moody, and super-protective of his younger sister.

After coming home to a tragedy, Piper and Andy are entered into the foster system. Piper is placed at once with Laura (Sally Hawkins), who caseworker Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton) describes in glowing terms. Although there is initial resistance, when Piper and Andy insist that they not be split up, Laura agrees to take them both.

Laura is a psychologist, who reveals to her new charges that she lost her twelve-year-old daughter Cathy (Mischa Heywood) in a drowning accident. Like Piper, Cathy was blind.

Laura is warm towards Piper, but keeps forgetting Andy’s name. His room (well, Laura wasn’t expecting him) is a barely converted storage area. The siblings soon encounter Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips), a very odd little boy who lives with Laura, but was never mentioned by Wendy.

Directors Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou, working from the script by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, succeed in making us worry about how all these pieces fit together from the start.

Surprising camera angles, images that reveal themselves slowly and ever-present water all add to the unsettling atmosphere, but by far the scariest element here is Laura. Hawkins puts such passion and grief into her performance that we can tell Laura is sure she is in the right and simply misunderstood.

However, the lengths to which Laura goes to achieve her goals are nightmarish in the extreme. The most horrifying monsters are perhaps the ones we understand.

There are supernatural aspects to BRING HER BACK, and they are creepy and alarming. The motif of water as a bringer of both vitality and dread is made resonant, as are the beautiful but forbidding environs. These all pale in comparison to the terrors offered by Laura’s visceral, very human menace.

Wong is wholly endearing and natural. Barratt is convincing in Andy’s commitment to Piper and his wariness of the world. Phillips is ethereal and frightening as Ollie.

BRING HER BACK draws us in and proceeds to ratchet up the tension until we are with the characters in maximum distress. It’s a thoroughly intense, immersive experience.

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