Bring Her Back (2025)

The Philippou brothers, having established themselves with a film about a possessed hand, return to the business of making audiences squirm. Bring Her Back places two step-siblings in the home of a foster mother named Laura, played by Sally Hawkins with a warmth that curdles by degrees, and then proceeds to drown them in ritual and body horror. The premise is grief: a dead daughter, a pool, a mother who would do anything to hear the word mum once more. The film that follows runs on dread and the sound of a child chewing a kitchen knife. It is efficient, unpleasant, and entirely uninterested in instructing anyone.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is largely silent. Its co-lead, Piper, is visually impaired, and the actress playing her, Sora Wong, had no prior experience before auditioning from a Facebook casting call. The production treats this as ordinary casting, not as a thesis, which keeps the gesture modest. There is no romantic or identity politics to speak of, no climate anxiety, no indictment of the wealthy. The antagonist is a bereaved woman, not a system. Her cruelty is personal, and the film holds her accountable with a car and a rain puddle instead of a moral.

The body horror deserves its own ledger line. Flesh is eaten, regurgitated, and reassembled, and a child gnaws through a countertop. This is the opposite of any message about loving the skin you are in. The film is grotesque on purpose and offers no consolation. Sally Hawkins commits fully, and Billy Barratt carries the guilt of a boy who kept a secret. The closing act disturbs without preaching. We leave the theater unsettled, which is, for this genre, the point.