Warning: This post contains spoilers for Bring Her Back.
The message of Bring Her Back may be that grief is the real monster. But desperate mother Laura (played with a harrowing intensity by Sally Hawkins) makes a pretty good one all on her own.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]As a follow-up to their acclaimed 2023 feature debut Talk to Me, Australian filmmaking brothers and RackaRacka YouTube creators Danny and Michael Philippou have delivered a brutal exploration of trauma and loss in the form of a boundary-pushing supernatural horror. The movie is vicious and visceral, and is currently sitting at a certified fresh rating of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Following a found footage-style opening sequence depicting a disturbing occult ritual, Bring Her Back introduces us to tight-knit step-siblings Piper (Sora Wong) and Andy (Billy Barratt). We quickly learn that 17-year-old Andy feels responsible for protecting his younger sister, who is mostly blind. So after they find their father bloodied, vomit-spattered, and dead in the shower, it makes sense that Andy—who is three months away from turning 18 and being allowed to become Piper’s legal guardian—fights to stay by her side as they’re turned over to child protective services. Unfortunately, their eccentric new foster mother, Laura, is really only interested in Piper, as she bears some striking similarities to Laura’s late daughter Cathy (Mischa Heywood), who drowned in their pool. In fact, it’s obvious Laura would prefer Andy not be there at all.
When Piper and Andy arrive at Laura’s secluded home, they find out she’s also housing a mute and seemingly disturbed young boy named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), whom she introduces as her nephew and often keeps locked away in his room. But as Oliver’s behavior turns increasingly violent and Laura’s attempts to create a divide between Piper and Andy grow ever more blatant, it becomes clear that whatever Laura’s really up to is far more dark and nefarious than simply not wanting troubled teen Andy moping around.
How Bring Her Back ends
Bring Her Back is a tough and squirm-inducing watch that never grants viewers any real reprieve as it hurtles toward its cruelly bleak conclusion. But for horror fans seeking nearly 100 minutes of relentless dread, this one is likely to get the job done.
In the end, it’s revealed that Laura, driven to all-consuming anguish by her daughter’s death, is attempting to use that same ritual we caught a glimpse of in the movie’s opening minutes to try to resurrect Cathy, whose frozen corpse she’s been keeping hidden away in a locked shed. We never find out how exactly Laura came into possession of the VHS tape containing the footage, but we do learn that the rite involves transferring the spirit of the dead into the body of another person via a possessed host. More specifically, the possessed host has to consume the dead before purging their remains into the mouth of a person who is sacrificed in the same manner in which the deceased originally died. Even more specifically, a possessed Oliver—who is actually not Laura’s nephew but rather a boy she kidnapped named Connor—is going to have to eat Cathy’s body and then vomit her into Piper’s mouth after Laura finishes drowning Piper in the pool, thus completing the soul transfer.
Following weeks of psychological torment at Laura’s hands, Andy returns to the CPS office and manages to convince their caseworker, Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton), that she needs to come check out what’s going on at the house. Laura’s latest ploy has been brutally hitting Piper in the face in the middle of the night and trying to convince her it was Andy, leaving Piper with a black eye and Andy desperate to get his sister away from Laura. But once Wendy realizes Andy is more than right about the danger at hand, Laura springs into action by trying to run both Wendy and Andy over with her car. Wendy is instantly killed and Laura then proceeds to drown a still-breathing Andy in a puddle.
When Piper returns home and discovers Andy’s body, she tries to get away but Laura overpowers her and drags her out to the pool. As Oliver stands at the ready, swollen with Cathy’s remains, Laura begins drowning a fighting and thrashing Piper. However, at the last minute, Piper screams out “Mom” and it jars Laura enough for her to realize that, after all that, she can’t bring herself to go through with killing Piper.
Piper escapes and is picked up by her goalball coach, who was apparently coming to check on her after seeing her black eye earlier that day. Later, the police discover Laura lying in the pool clutching the mutilated remains of Cathy’s body. They also find Connor, who managed to make his way outside of Laura’s circle of possession, crying for help on the ground as he comes back into his right mind.
Piper’s final scene shows her hearing a plane soaring overhead as she recalls Andy trying to comfort her in the wake of their dad’s death by describing how planes carry the souls of the departed to the afterlife: “We’re not burned or buried, we just catch a flight.”
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