Bring Her Back

A Foster Home Built on Bones

After *Talk to Me*, I wasn’t sure what Danny and Michael Philippou would do next, or whether that first movie’s jolt had been a one-off. *Bring Her Back* answers the question by going colder and crueler. It’s a nasty film, deliberately so. Where *Talk to Me* had a feral teenage pulse, this 2025 follow-up is all slow poison: less party-game possession, more psychological rot that seeps into every room. I wouldn’t call it enjoyable, and I don’t think the brothers want you to.



The setup is miserable in a way horror often loves. Andy, seventeen and already stretched thin, and his visually impaired stepsister Piper are shoved into foster care after finding their father dead in the shower. Their new home belongs to Laura, a former social worker played by Sally Hawkins, and the whole movie depends on what Hawkins does with that part. She’s made a career out of playing tenderness so convincingly that seeing her twist it here is genuinely unnerving. Laura’s kindness has a hard shell around it. Her smile stays fixed a beat too long. Her hands flutter while the rest of her body stays rigid, like she’s trying to keep herself assembled through force of habit alone.



Laura is grieving her dead daughter, and the house already holds another foster child, Oliver, played by Jonah Wren Phillips with a near-supernatural creepiness. The movie’s dread comes less from jump scares than from slowly realizing what Laura thinks these children are for. The Philippous are not shy about gore, and sometimes they push so far it stops feeling like terror and starts feeling punitive. The kitchen knife and melon scene is the one that really got me: the sound is so wet and tactile that looking away feels like the only sane response. As David Ehrlich might say, it’s the sort of gore that lands less like a scare than an assault. *Paste Magazine* was right to call it "a daunting exercise in unpleasantness." Whether that’s admirable or exhausting probably comes down to your tolerance for cruelty.



I do think the film cheats a little with Piper. Too often, her visual impairment gets used as suspense equipment, a handy way to make scenes more vulnerable rather than a fully developed part of who she is. But the desperate bond between Piper and Andy keeps the film from floating off into pure nastiness, even once the story swerves toward that strange Russian occult ritual in the third act. I’m still sitting with the ending. *Bring Her Back* refuses the release you keep hoping it will offer. What it leaves behind instead is grief gone sour, with nowhere to travel except outward.