Australian horror film-makers have spectacularly overdelivered in the last few years, conjuring various nerve-shredding bangers includingLate Night with the Devil,You Won’t Be Alone,You’ll Never Find Me,Sissy, Leigh Whannell’sunderratedWolf Man reboot andTalk to Me. The latter – which revolves around thrill-seeking teenagers who converse with spirits instead of taking recreational drugs (kids these days!) – marked the fiendishly good debut of Adelaide-born directors Danny and Michael Philippou.
They’re back – or baaa-ack! – with another serving of macabre bravado pulled from the black cauldron. Bring Her Back is lighter on thrills and spills for the midnight movie and heavy with thick, abject horror and despair, featuring an intensely disturbing performance fromSally Hawkinsas a foster mother from hell. She plays Laura, a former social worker who welcomes into her house two teens around whom the story orbits: Piper (Sora Wong), who is vision impaired, and her older brother, Andy (Billy Barratt).
Early in the run time, the pair discover their father dead in the bathroom, and, with Andy three months too young to be Piper’s guardian, they move in with Laura and her other foster child, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). The latter is a creepy kid from central casting: mute, with a shaved head, a thousand-yard stare and a tendency to do things that literally left me watching the film through the gaps between my fingers.
It’s clear that something’s a little off about Laura, whose daughter died some time ago. But the script (written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman) obscures her intentions for a long time, fuelling an aura of dreadful anticipation. Hawkins’ performance is coy, evasively dancing between light and heavy emotions; trying to nail down exactly what’s wrong with Laura is like trying to pin down water with a knife. She creates a character who’s needy, desperate and, as we increasingly realise, choked up with intense longing, before moving into a more volcanic space.
Strange sounds rumble and buzz on the soundtrack, with Cornel Wilczek’s shapeshifting score unfolding as if it were partly composed by demons; perhaps he got a hold of the embalmed hand from Talk to Me and consulted the spirit world. Circles become a visual motif, implying dark magic and rituals, and there are blurry sporadic visions of demonic undertakings recorded on videotapes. The humble old VHS format has been retooled into an eerie relic of yesteryear, ghouls from the past roaming around in the shadows of a passé technology, insulated from the modern digital world.
Keep an eye on Oliver: when this kid starts doing crazy stuff, Bring Her Back goes next-level, conjuring images that will challenge even horror enthusiasts with cast-iron stomachs. There’s no doubting this film’s art, craft and impact, although I did leave the cinema wondering whether I was a richer person for having experienced it, or in some way irrevocably tarnished.
I might ordinarily have felt inclined to go home and take a cold shower – but not after this film. Water is often used to signify cleansing, renewal and rebirth but, in their most audacious visual accomplishment, the Philippous turn H20 into something hideous, a metaphorical devil’s rain signifying unrelenting emotional pressure. They achieve this partly through contrast: there’s either too much water or not enough.
An example of the former belongs to that terrible early scene when Piper and Andy encounter the corpse of their fathe, water still gushing from the shower, steam thickening the air into a horrible deathly fog. An example of the latter can be found in Laura’s empty swimming pool, which is an oddly evocative image: to observe a pool without water is to see something that just isn’tright –a literal emptiness; a space that should be filled.
I dare say that the pool might not be front of mind when the closing credits roll. You’ll be plagued by much more distressing visuals – and, like me, wondering how to get rid of them.
Bring Her Back isin cinemas in Australia from Thursday, in the US from Friday, and in the UK from 1 August