by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips, Sally-Anne Upton, Stephen Phillips
Intro:
… a slick, staggeringly confident and utterly soul-scraping work of horror excellence that will gut you like a fish and leave you blinking in the sunlight.
Talk to Me, from first time Aussie feature directors Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, was easily one of the best films of 2023 (all the best people say so). Slick, engaging, genuinely scary at times and featuring young characters that you actually care about (even if you occasionally wanted to knock their bloody phones out of their hands), it was a striking debut from a pair of talented up and comers. It also made a boatload of dosh at the local and international box office. The question of a follow-up was posited almost immediately and now that query has been answered in the form of Bring Her Back, a very different film that still, against all odds, delivers the goods and then some. In other words, it’s another cracker from the blokes sometimes known as RackaRacka.
Bring Her Back is the story of recently orphaned youngsters Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), who move in with their new foster mother, Laura (Sally Hawkins) in a pleasant but isolated house. Laura is, to say the least, a quirky character whose moods are capricious and behaviour often bizarre. However, she’s nothing compared to their new foster brother Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) who frankly seems to come from a different planet, with his wide staring eyes and mute, creepy antics. Obviously, something weird is going on but will Andy and Piper figure it out before things turn very dark indeed? Actually, no.
The first thing you should know about Bring Her Back is that it goes far harder than you might expect. This is a dark film, blacker than Satan’s festy clacker, and has far more in common with the likes of Ari Aster’s Hereditary or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary than Talk to Me’s more conventional peers. This is what director John Waters calls a “feel bad film”, grim and nasty from top to tail. It’s also really bloody good.
Performances are stunning. Sally Hawkins absolutely owns the screen as the deeply demented Laura, but the kids are also amazing, with Sora Wong (in her first role, no less!) absolutely devastating as the little sister and Jonah Wren Phillips incredible as… whatever the hell he is. Billy Barratt also does fine work as the older brother so close to adulthood and refreshingly talks and acts like a real-life 17-year-old instead of a whipper snapper acting as a mouthpiece for a middle-aged screenwriter.
Major props also belong to the Philippou brothers themselves, who direct the hell out of this yarn with a deft ability to generate mounting suspense and tension that belies their relatively new careers. Plus, the excellent (and often gag-inducing) special make-up effects will have all but the hardiest of genre fans wincing or hiding behind their sweaty, splayed fingers.
Grief has the ability to make monsters of us all. Stephen King knows this and so, apparently, do Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou. Bring Her Back is a slick, staggeringly confident and utterly soul-scraping work of horror excellence that will gut you like a fish and leave you blinking in the sunlight. It’s not a particularly cheerful time, but it’s a hell of a movie, and proof positive that the brothers Philippou are Australia’s most ferociously talented genre voices.
