Critics and audiences may be taken by the hooey that is BRING HER BACK, but it’s a poseur of a film, one that ignores its own internal logic and the logic of the real world, for that matter. It’s a well-produced yarn that unfortunately relies on easy frights, egregious misdirection, and stupidity running rampant amongst its characters to achieve its goals of scaring an audience. If all that qualifies it as one of the better horror movies of 2025 as some are exclaiming it to be, I worry for the state of the genre. What this effort really proves is that Danny and Michael Philippou, the two brothers from Australia, are filmmakers with skills at directing horror, but their illogical hokum of a script played to me like a cheap magician’s trick and I call bunk.
Let’s start with the film’s pitch…Wikipedia states, “A brother and sister uncover a terrifying ritual at the secluded home of their new foster mother.” This is not the plot. It’s window dressing that has nothing to do with the crux of the story and exists only to provide a coating of unearned satanic creepiness. The film’s villain Laura (Sally Hawkins) watches a ritualistic videotape that apparently showcases an orgy of torture, murder, sex, and cultish mumbo jumbo that she participated in, but deeper implications from it get lost in most of the story past her VHS player. (And yes, she’s still watching a VHS player tape in 2025. Sigh.)
The real plot finds Laura (Sally Hawkins) taking in teenagers Piper (Sora Wong) and Andy (Billy Barratt) after their widowed father dies. Laura wants Piper, as she fancies having a young daughter, but reluctantly takes Andy as part of the package even though she wants nothing to do with him. This is baloney as no state program would allow a foster parent to take in a child they did not want. Yet another slice of baloney comes early when the teens enter Laura’s home and can clearly see that she’s cuckoo, what with her stuffed, dead pet sitting in the kitchen and a dirty, unkempt home hardly suited for children. Worst of all is her young teen son Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) who grunts and barks like he’s Frankenstein’s creature, a psycho kid so frightening that it looks like he’s going to tear the head off the family cat every time he picks it up. This home was deemed a proper environment for two orphans? Even if Laura used to work for the foster care program, the state would still have to check all of this out before allowing her to take in two new kids.
Such lapses in credibility continue as the story moves on. The Philippou brothers eschew sensibility to make their haunted house movie easier to build, but they’re being lazy by not giving it a more sound structure. In any horror movie taking place in such a singular, terrifying location, the filmmakers must find a reason that the characters must stay there. The Philippou bros. have not done so here. In fact, their story holds even less water because the two smart teens should have immediately recognized the danger they’re in but instead blithely ignore it. Such idiocy on the part of the protagonists lost me a mere 15 minutes into the running time of 99 minutes. If the characters in the story don’t care about putting themselves in such danger, why should an audience?
Piper, by the way, is blind, which immediately creates pathos for her, but should also suggest a character savvy enough to perceive her surroundings with enhanced understanding through smell and touch, yet this girl barely reacts to the pigsty of a home, let alone the creepy and completely untouched bedroom of Laura’s deceased daughter that she is forced to occupy. Meanwhile, Andy is assigned to a virtual closet for his room, and he too accepts such a horrid setup with barely a shrug.
Laura’s lunacy increases exponentially as she invades Andy’s privacy repeatedly, snatches his cellphone to read his messages, calls him vicious names, dumps her urine on him while he sleeps, and flits about like one of Hannibal Lecter’s neighbors in the bowels of the sanitarium. Why does Andy, who’ll turn 18 in three months, ignore such signs screaming at him to get out? He owns a car but doesn’t immediately grab his handicapped and vulnerable sister and hightail it out of there?
By the time Oliver’s self-mutilation turns into ridiculously grotesque excess and Laura starts making up lies on the spot that put everyone in immediate physical danger, the two orphans finally start to wise up. But again, the Philippou brothers cheat. They have just one foster care worker come to visit the house of horrors after the kids file a complaint, with no police along for the investigation. Gee, could it be that way so Laura can get away with more hostile mischief left unchecked to keeping propelling the plot forward? Ugh.
BRING HER BACK has a lot of jump scares, good performances (particularly by Wong), and some truly vivid bloodletting. But it never makes sense on all the levels that we need to suspend our disbelief. At least not this horror fan and film critic. The brothers seem content to earn their scares by yelling, “Boo!” in the most undisciplined ways, but for me, my boos were of a different kind. They were the kind I wanted to shout out in protest at their infuriating production.
