Central to Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me was the idea that the universe doesn’t play fair. In horror movies, promethean punishments are doled out for the smallest of infractions; pettiness, jealousy, consumption, lust, and other quintessentially human qualities are met with disproportionately violent consequences. The genre thrives on a tightrope walk between empathy and schadenfreude, and it’s this nasty little balancing act that gave the Australian Youtubers’ first feature its feral bite. Their follow-up, Bring Her Back, dials up this sense of unfairness to the extreme. Similarly enamored with child endangerment, the Philippous’ latest follows characters whose only sin is having suffered, and there’s little joy to be found in watching them suffer further.
Andy (Billy Barrett) and his disabled half-sister Piper (Sora Wong) come home one day to find their father lifeless on the bathroom floor. Child services tries to place them in separate homes, but Andy — three months shy of his 18th birthday, when he can apply for Piper’s guardianship — refuses to leave his sister’s side. This poses a problem for their quirky new foster mum Laura (Sally Hawkins), whose eccentricities poorly conceal a more sinister endgame. Laura subtly ostracizes Andy from their makeshift family, quickly identifying and ruthlessly preying upon the teenager’s weaknesses in order to isolate Piper; her partial blindness reminds the grieving woman of her own similarly-sighted daughter, whose accidental drowning in their outdoor swimming pool casts a perpetual pall over Laura’s attempts at outward joviality.
The children also discover an additional foster child, the mute Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who wanders the premises bug-eyed and shirtless whenever he isn’t locked in his room. Ollie’s insatiable hunger — for animals, for household objects, and most gruesomely, for his own frail flesh — is just one facet of Laura’s nefarious designs. She watches videotapes of violent cult rituals (their origin never quite clear) with the same hushed reverence as she does videos of her daughter, drawing a queasy parallel between snuff films and home movies.
Lacking the kind of high-concept hook that launched their previous effort into the viral stratosphere, the Philippous populate their film with parallels and throughlines: the camera stages some sequences partially out of focus to align us with Piper’s perspective, circles take on practical and spiritual significance, and running water becomes a symbol of domestic violence — the children’s father used to switch the shower on to muffle the sounds of him beating Andy, a harrowing fact that the boy had managed to shield his sister from, and one that the predatory Laura subsequently wields to her own advantage to drive a wedge between the siblings. These are the kinds of techniques that often make for rich and riveting storytelling, but in the context of Bring Her Back’s narrative shortcomings, they come across as gimmicky grasps at profundity. Hawkins’ performance, too, is the film’s emotional and thematic crutch, suggesting wells of interlaced pain and evil that the screenplay is content to flatten into stereotype. Laura’s derangements come across as hopelessly gendered, playing into the maternal, monstrous feminines of recent horror movies, distinguished only by actorly veneers of empathy and interiority.
The Philippous have proven their knack for indelible images — a child impelled to chew through solid wood, a mother cradling her child’s rotting corpse in a state of utter calm — but the connective tissue that binds these racking shocks together is considerably more downbeat in this latest project than it was in the gleeful sadism that perfused Talk to Me. Bring Her Back’s similarly giddy and excitable form squares poorly with its anguished, sensitive content, and the ultimate result is a harsh, morose, and acutely unpleasant viewing experience.
DIRECTOR: Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou; CAST: Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips, Sally-Anne Upton; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: May 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
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