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Apart from the reflex response to a jump scare, the purpose of almost any horror movie is to disturb you. Yet if you’re a junkie for horror films, you can build up a tolerance to that sort of thing. It can be rare to encounter the kind of horror movie that genuinely creeps you out, that gets under your skin, that troubles your dreams. But “Bring Her Back,” the second feature by the Australian YouTube horror-comedy pranksters-turned-filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou (“Talk to Me”), qualifies as a majorly disturbing piece of horror.
The film, set in suburban Australia, is a domestic nightmare fever dream, and it is also, at moments, a bit of a hallucinatory free-form shambles. But you can’t separate the two. The old-school classicist in me wishes that “Bring Her Back” were more tidy and logical, but the Philippous work in a mode that’s impressionistic in an accomplished enough way to justify itself. They don’t care about tying up every bloody loose end. They’re after a feeling, a lavish sensation of malevolent shock.
The set-up is elemental, the sort of thing you could imagine being the springboard for one of those black-and-white Roman Polanski chillers from the ’60s. In the city of Adelaide, Piper (Sora Wong), who is visually impaired (she can see shapes and light but is legally blind), and her fiercely protective older brother, Andy (Billy Barratt), arrive home one day to find their father collapsed on the floor of the shower, after having suffered some sort of seizure. He‘s gone, and they are now orphans. The two siblings are close, and since Andy is just three months shy of turning 18, at which point he can apply to be Piper’s legal guardian, his plan is for them to live on their own. But until then they’re required to have a foster parent, and the one they land is Laura (Sally Hawkins), a veteran child-care worker and counselor who lives in a big roomy secluded home.
As soon as they arrive, she’s happy to see them. Maybe too happy. A foster parent should be welcoming, but Laura exudes a palsy enthusiasm that lies somewhere between unbecoming and squirmy. Sally Hawkins, fabled for her performances in Mike Leigh films like “Happy-Go-Lucky” and “All or Nothing,” and for her work in “The Shape of Water,” “Blue Jasmine,” “Spencer,” and the “Paddington” movies, is a stupendous actor who can play characters of overwhelming empathy, but as her high-wire turn in “Happy-Go-Lucky” demonstrated she’s brilliant at conjuring a certain flaky blinkered quality. In “Bring Her Back,” her Laura is a mother figure so pushy and “gregarious” that she gives you the cold creeps.
She’s got hidden agendas, a whole passel of them that arrive in the form of red flags the movie just about waves in our faces. Laura’s own daughter, who was also blind, died mysteriously. (That’s the “her” of the title.) Laura keeps a stuffed dog in the living room. There’s the way that she leads her new kids in a flamboyantly inappropriate late-night dance party, with the whiskey flowing. And if Laura’s tone of grinning noodginess is easy enough to rationalize away, her other foster child is not. Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who appears to be about 10, is mute, with an androgynous crewcut look, a purple mark under his right eye, and a blank scowl that makes him resemble an angel and a demon at the same time. When he starts acting out, look out.
It’s not as if the movie is working hard to be subtle. “Bring Her Back” barges right out of the gate, opening on an intensely upsetting note of grainy VHS footage that depicts shot-on-camcorder images of some weirdly grisly cult ritual, with bodies being hoisted into the air by nooses. The film keeps returning to that footage, which only grow more intense, as we start to see corpses with bloody mangled faces — and there, smack in the middle of it all, is Laura. From the start she’s presented as a dark force, with actual skeletons in her closet.
But it’s the nature of children to trust, so Andy and Piper, despite the odd currents that Laura gives off, do all they can to normalize their environment. Even when Laura turns into an aggressor, they try to get along with her.
Yet seeing children subjected to cruelty crosses a line of dramatic transgression, and “Bring her Back” is all about how Laura visits a primal cruelty on the children in her care. Piper, dependent on others due to her lack of vision, is in the most gullible position, and we see Laura try to pry her away from Andy — to lie and manipulate until Andy looks like the bad guy, so that she can then possess Piper. In the more staid version of this movie that might have been made decades ago, that would have been the core of the drama.
Here, though, the spectacle of Laura’s darkness is not presented as a slowly unfolding insidious revelation. The film is more baroque than that. Laura’s monstrous quality is in-your-face and omnipresent. In “Bring Her Back,” we’re watching an almost symphonic projection of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Andy keeps waking up in a puddle of his own pee, and when we see why that’s happening it’s horrifying, because it’s about a hideous extreme of heartlessness. When Oliver, who did not come from a foster home, starts to mutilate himself in the ugliest of ways, he’s acting on his own, but we feel the invisible link to Laura — that he’s really acting out her will. By the time he grabs a kitchen knife and shoves it into his own mouth, breaking his front teeth, you may feel yourself not so much jumping in fear as slinking back into your seat in dread.
There are things in the movie that add up without quite adding up. At the funeral of Andy and Piper’s father, Laura, at the open casket, secretly cuts off a lock of his hair, using it as a kind of voodoo totem — but we’re still not sure what it’s supposed to do or mean. Laura’s empty swimming pool comes in for a major metaphorical workout, and the film is dotted with memes and totems of a kind of witchcraft we’re never given the full decoder ring to. The VHS flashbacks to the cult horrors are disquieting enough to make you want to see them explained more. Why be so oblique? But that seems to be the Philippou method — a kind of De Sade-meets-surrealist-music-video approach to horror.
What tethers the film to reality are the accomplished performances of Billy Barratt and Sora Wong, who make Andy and Piper achingly vulnerable and real. It’s striking to see a young actor like Barratt, who has the look of a Robert Pattinson in the making, burrow so far into insecurity and terror. And Wong, who has never acted before, has the kind of authentic presence that can infuse a scene with tension. These two give you something to hold onto and root for. In the end, though, it’s Sally Hawkins who seals the movie with her spectacular fear and loathing, her domestic-harridan version of a gargoyle grin of evil.
English (US) ·