‘Bring Her Back’ review: Sally Hawkins delivers ‘unspeakable evil’ for the Philippou Brothers

Dir: Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou. Austrailia. 2025. 103mins

The second feature from directors Danny and Michael Philippou (Talk To Me) features Sally Hawkins as a foster mother who clearly has something to hide, but what exactly? The gradual unravelling of that terrible secret powers Bring Her Back, a malevolent, Australia-set horror in which two step-siblings come under her care and are soon fighting for their lives. The Oscar- and Bafta-nominated actor gives a fiendish performance, hinting at her character’s wickedness before delivering a portrait of unspeakable evil that is sinister in its subtlety. 

A riveting examination of warped maternal instincts

Talk To Me grossed $92 million worldwide in 2022, and Bring Her Back opens May 29 in the twin brothers’ homeland of Australia before hitting US theatres the following day. Hawkins’ unsettling turn could raise the film’s profile, and those already enamoured of the Philippous’ brand of suffocating horror should be satiated with this second bloody helping.

As Bring Her Back begins, teenage siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) have just experienced a terrible shock: their single father has died. As as they mourn his passing, they learn that they will be taken in by Laura (Hawkins), a quirky, awkward school counsellor who has already adopted another orphan, the weirdly stoic Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), while grieving the recent death of her beloved daughter Cathy. Andy has always vowed to protect his stepsister Piper, who is partially sighted, and he starts to suspect that Laura has nefarious plans for them.

As with the Philippou brothers’ 2022 debut, Bring Her Back touches on childhood trauma, the occult, and the thin line between the living and the dead. Again working with cinematographer Aaron McLisky and composer Cornel Wilczek, the filmmakers fill the frame with a sense of foreboding, even before Laura starts to behave strangely. Each of her odd actions, which include snipping a lock of hair from the corpse of the siblings’ father’s at the funeral, is shot with chilling detachment, inviting the viewer to speculate wildly about her ulterior motives. Over the course of the film, Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman’s screenplay deftly reveals just enough new information so that audiences start to see the whole picture without fully grasping what Laura has in store — or how Oliver factors into her scheme.

Hawkins brings a disquieting naturalism to her portrayal of Laura, whose affected sunniness suggests a woman battling private demons. The actress brings such shading to the role that even during Laura’s sweetest moments, the audience is braced.. It would be unfair to spoil where the story goes, but as Bring Her Back becomes more outrageous and graphically violent, Hawkins’ commitment to depicting Laura as a true believer in the importance of her secret objective gives the film a sickening seductiveness. Although hardly the first horror picture to illustrate how frightening mothers (or foster mothers) can be, Bring Her Back turns that genre truism into both a dark joke and a riveting examination of warped maternal instincts.

Her two young co-stars do fine work as siblings who only have each other although Wong, making her film debut, cannot always rescue Piper from being a convenient narrative construction. Because of Piper’s difficulty seeing beyond general shapes and colours, she leans on her brother to shield her from school bullies, but once she falls into Laura’s clutches, her life will be much more profoundly at risk. Sometimes, the Philippous’ treatment of Piper can veer toward cruelty, constantly capitalising on her sight issues in order to leave her helpless during suspenseful moments. Certainly, horror should be ruthless in its pursuit of scares, but the filmmakers’ use of Piper as a prop feels needlessly manipulative.

Bring Her Back goes for the jugular in other, better ways, delivering a string of gruesome images involving sharp knives, fragile teeth, distended bellies and copious amounts of gore. When the Philippous revisit standard horror tropes about grief, the picture becomes more pedestrian — and, as with with Talk To Me, a few rickety plot twists and an underwhelming finale undercut the stronger earlier reels. But as a meticulously coiled study of nasty doings under one roof, Bring Her Back convincingly argues that terror starts at home.