Phantasmal Gallery
Phantasmal Gallery
Thoughts & Feelings -Bring Her Back
​
Faye S.
Still from "Bring Her Back' By Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou 2025
This writer is trying their hardest to not spoil big things about the movie so proceed with caution.
​
Premise of Bring Her Back (2025): Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) are siblings whose father (Stephen Phillips) dies tragically in the shower. When the system threatens to separate them, Andy, being the older one, insists on following his sister to her “new home”. Their new guardian is Laura (Sally Hawkins), an ex social worker and mother of Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips) and Cathy( Mischa Heywood), the former is another adopted child, while the latter has already died after drowning. Laura’s “parenting” style is not always agreeable with Andy who fears Laura might be a tad too attached to Piper. You can’t talk about Bring Her Back without first talking about the violence and the symbolism behind the circles. What is violence within a family if not a cycle that repeats itself and a confinement you cannot escape from.
The film contains multiple cyclical symbols. It begins with the snuff-film like footage of a woman inside a circle, another circle is drawn in paint and acts as a threshold around the house where the action takes place, even in mundanity the symbol is ever present, like the circular shower head that gives Andy pause and the cyclical movements Laura keeps repeating on Ollie’s head. All the circles that appear, however ordinary, carry heavy meaning.
Still from "Bring Her Back' By Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou 2025
For example, there is a scene where Laura is trying to command “something” inside one of the children, Ollie, and she ends up drawing circles in her own blood repeatedly on the window that separates them. The circles go clockwise and anticlockwise. After the abuse that Ollie has been subjected to the repeated motion feels like a reminder, violence within a familial unit is a pattern that reoccurs as long as the adult in the situation allows for and encourages it. In another instance, Andy, the oldest and strongest of the children, lashes out verbally at Laura, upon understanding that both him and his sister Piper are in danger. Laura eggs him on, trying to make him violent to prove to Piper that he is unstable. Piper on the other hand, being the receiver of all of Laura’s love and attention is reluctant to see the ways in which their foster guardian is manipulating her and abusing her brother. Lastly, Ollie is a vessel for Laura’s violence, he walks about the house hitting things and consuming things he shouldn’t consume, all the while being silent.
There is something to be said about Ollie, the all-consuming child who just stands there. Ollie is an open wound more than a character, a black hole who is possessed by the personification of Laura’s grief-turned-madness, unable to be himself because there is no room for himself in the body and soul that Laura abuses.
Still from "Bring Her Back' By Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou 2025
This movie is not just a tale of a woman who kidnaps and abuses children, it is a tale of how systems put in place to protect vulnerable children fail constantly. In Laura’s house everything is purposeful and intentional, there is no escaping the cycle of violence that acts as a barrier which keeps them all dancing in Laura’s tune.
Helplessness naturally is portrayed in a shocking manner, because helplessness is a terrifying prison. The film is horrifying precisely because it engulfs you, it breaks the feeling of powerlessness down into small indigestible bites, then force feeds you all at once while it shoves your face on the table.
The thing that fascinates me about the way the Philippou brothers approach film-making is the use of montages. In Talk to Me (2022) one of the most memorable scenes is the music video-esque montage. The song Le Monde by Richard Carter (based on La Foule by Edith Piaf) dominated Tik Tok for a while, but the use of it in the movie is beyond just an aesthetic whim (which in Greek we also call καπρίτσιο, incidentally in English capriccio can be translated to “a short and lively piece of music”). Le Monde is not just a capriccio to lighten the mood, it also operates as an alarm. Underneath the veil of a catchy beat and the montage of teenage shenanigans, slithers the horrifying implication of what is actually happening on screen. A group of unsupervised teenagers are essentially being entertained by abusing drugs and inviting spirits into their friends’ bodies.
Still from 'Talk To Me' By Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou 2022
In the same vein, the capriccio in Bring Her Back is a lively and fun dance-break for the characters, as Piper, Andy and Laura get drunk and dance and sing for a minute or two. While the scene appears to be a breather for the audience, in actuality it creates a false sense of security. These are not safe circumstances, Andy and Piper are minors who are being encouraged to get drunk by an adult who is a stranger to them and is meant to be their guardian. In Talk To Me the montage was artful, playful, uncomfortable yet fun. In Bring Her Back it operates in the same channel but there is the added implication of the prelude to the madness that will ensue. It feels raw and personal.
Bring Her Back includes -if my memory does not deceive me- three songs in the montage, one of which is “Freaks”, a party song the melody of which is familiar to those of us who remember the vine of the child banging the furnace door and the father playing the trumpet. You would think this has no place in a horror movie about child abuse, you might want to hold off a second. There is an even more inappropriate song that follows one -out of the two- most disgusting and horrible scenes in the movie. Without spoiling too much, there is a knife incident, after which a character is, understandably, in incredible pain. The song that Laura chooses to play during the scene where she muffles a screaming child is none other than “Untouched” by the Veronicas. It is one of the most disorienting things I have ever experienced. A beloved nostalgic bop being repurposed to dress a scene so horrible it stays in your mind even after the credits roll, after you go home tuck yourself in bed and still feel your teeth ache.
Still from "Bring Her Back' By Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou 2025
The film goes to great lengths to ensure you are experiencing the most violent of whiplashes, pairing friendly jabs with gaslighting, “dance-breaks” with predatory undertones, and horrific abuse with girly- pop music. I think the importance of the “dance-break”, or “capriccio”, or montage, resides precisely in its power to push you into complacency and safety, everything is going to be fine because there is fun music
being blasted in our ears. But underneath the heartfelt moments, the release of the
tension, there lays more horror.
One of the most promising things about the movie is the way it portrays Piper’s disability, more often than not disabled characters in horror are typically evil or exist solely for easy kills. Despite the most recent years rise in awareness in how we portray characters with disabilities there is still not much effort being put into casting actors with disabilities (Hush 2016 being the most recent one that comes to mind). It is even more monumental then that Bring Her Back (much like A Quiet Place, 2018) went the distance and not only fleshed out Piper’s character on screen but also cast a visually impaired actress.
Lastly, it is of note that Bring Her Back is reminiscent of another movie that took the world by surprise and fright, that is Ari Aster’s Hereditary 2018. Both films grapple with grief, family dynamics, child abuse and include a possessed child as well as the funeral of a deceased family member. For fans of Hereditary, we already know you love journeys of helplessness framed by the supernatural and horrifying, Bring Her Back will be right up your alley, just expect a bit more gore and bit more fun -all things considered.
