Please note there will be spoilers for the whole movie ahead.
Ever since I walked out of my showing of Bring Her Back earlier in the week, this film has been sitting at the bottom of my stomach like a lead weight.
And I mean that in the most complimentary sense imaginable, because the Phillipou brother’s sophomore feature (their follow-up to 2023’s Talk To Me) is one of my favourite films of the year, if not one of my favourite horror movies of the decade so far. It’s a film that truly embraces the most aberrant and disturbing sides of the genre in an utterly unflinching way – the kind of movie that reminds you just how transgressive and challenging horror can be, and is all the better for it. I’m not sure I’d recommend it, as it’s such a grim, gruelling, and gruesome watch, but it’s one that I was really impressed by on a technical and emotional level.
And there’s lot to get into when it comes to analysing the movie (hell, I considered a whole article just on the brilliance of the attached ARG and how it offers lore for those who want it without bogging down the actual plot with overt exposition), but the aspect I found most fascinating about it – and the one I want to talk about today – is the manipulation of perception as a running theme, for better and for worse.
Bring Her Back is, in a lot of ways, a film about the way that our perceptions of the world can be shaped by the people who surround us and the experiences we have. Laura (Sally Hawkins, who will be snubbed for an Oscar this year which I will be making everyone’s problem) is the film’s primary antagonist, a foster carer for a pair of recently-orphaned step-siblings Piper (Sora Wong) and Andy (Billy Barratt) driven to such agony by the loss of her daughter that she’s willing to sacrifice Piper to bring her back. And, in that process, she seeks to drive a wedge between Piper and Andy to ensure that Andy will not be able to take custody of her when he comes of age, via a campaign of gaslighting that she terrorizes Andy with throughout the movie.
And the gaslighting she subjects him to is amongst the most disturbing parts of this movie, at least for me – the way Sally Hawkins imbues Laura with such a pointed fragility, using her knowledge of Andy’s past to craft this image of him as a violent abuser not unlike his father. The sheer extent she goes to – assaulting Piper to frame Andy, pouring her own piss on him as he sleeps to sew doubt in his own mind about his stability, carefully managing other people’s interactions with him – to fit him in to the narrative of a disturbed teenage boy lashing out at the women around him, unaware of his own strength, makes for one of the most disturbing antagonists I’ve seen in horror in recent memory.
But she’s not the only one managing people’s perceptions. No, in fact, Andy himself does the same thing, albeit for far more altruistic reasons, when it comes to his vision-impaired sister Piper. The movie opens with Piper’s attempts to connect with some girls her own age, only for them to mock her disability – when she asks Andy how they reacted, he’s quick to lie for her, protecting her feelings as best he can. It’s a microcosm of the conflict that exists between them over the course of the entire movie, particularly when it comes to their respective relationships with their shared father.
Andy suffered physical and psychological abuse at the hands of his father, abuse that he has gone out of his way to protect Piper from – he doesn’t want her to be exposed to the darkest parts of the world, even when it means shouldering the burden of that abuse alone. And it makes for a fascinating comparison to Laura’s story – both of them focused on Piper, both manipulating the way she sees the world to different ends, one as a protective measure and the other as a means to a hopelessly grim end. To mirror the antagonist and protagonist like this is a pretty damn bold move, but, with Andy acknowledging the harm he’s done and the trust he’s broken in the process of protecting her, it offers both Piper and the audience a clarity and catharsis that the story might otherwise be lacking.
The parallels between them serve as an extension of the movie’s central themes of grief and loss and the way they shade our view of the world, another layer in the Phillipou brothers’ really dense and rewarding modern horror classic. I know there are a million ways to analyse Bring Her Back and I’d love to hear your takeaways from the movie in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Entertainment Weekly)
No But Listen 