Bring Her Back

Sally Hawkins ruins you in Bring Her Back. There is no other honest way to start this review. Hawkins plays Laura, a former counselor who has spent two years engineering a plan to bring her drowned daughter back from the dead using a demonic ritual involving a possessed boy and the body of a visually impaired girl. She is methodical, loving, and completely insane. And the performance is so grounded, so genuinely maternal, that you feel her grief like a bruise before you fully understand what she is doing.

Danny and Michael Philippou's follow-up to Talk to Me is a more confident film than their debut. Talk to Me was a tightly wound possession thriller that turned on grief and teenage impulsivity. Bring Her Back is slower, stranger, and more disturbing precisely because Laura is not a monster in the traditional horror sense. She is a mother who loved her daughter. She is doing the worst things imaginable in service of that love. The film never lets you forget both of those things simultaneously.

The setup: Andy (Billy Barratt) and his visually impaired stepsister Piper (Sora Wong) lose their father Phil to cancer and are placed in foster care with Laura. Laura is also fostering a pre-teen boy named Oliver, who stopped speaking after Laura's daughter Cathy drowned in the backyard pool. The parallel is too neat to be coincidence, and Andy figures it out before the audience does, which is the film's most effective structural choice.

Barratt's Andy is one of 2025's better horror protagonists because he is genuinely compromised. He resented his father, who was affectionate with Piper but abusive with him. When Phil dies, Andy does not feel the clean grief the situation demands. He feels something messy and guilty, and Laura reads that guilt with terrifying precision, using it to isolate Andy from Piper while she positions Piper as the vessel for her ritual. The film understands that trauma makes people exploitable, and uses that understanding without flinching.

The occult mechanics are specific and disturbing. A demon called Tari inhabits Oliver and must be fed and maintained. Oliver eats inanimate objects. He eats parts of himself. When he finally eats what Laura intends, he will regurgitate it into Piper's body, drowned in the same pool as Cathy, to bring Cathy back. The film shows all of this. It does not cut away. The effect is genuinely horrifying in the visceral sense, not the jump-scare sense.

From a traditional values perspective, Bring Her Back is a film with two competing moral frameworks, and the tension between them is what gives it more weight than typical horror. The traditional reading: a mother's love, corrupted beyond recognition by grief and desperate bargaining with forces she should not have contacted, becomes an instrument of destruction. The film's climax turns on Piper crying out 'mum' as Laura drowns her, and Laura releasing her. That is a traditional moment: maternal instinct breaking through even the most complete corruption of maternal love. Laura cannot kill Piper once Piper calls her mother. Whatever Tari and the ritual have made of Laura, that one thing remains human.

The non-traditional reading: the film's supernatural framework is explicitly occult, with no Christian counter. Evil is real, demons are real, and the mechanism for fighting them is physical rather than spiritual. There is no prayer, no priest, no invocation of divine protection. Andy defeats the situation by removing Oliver from the ritual circle's boundary. Piper defeats it by forcing Laura's maternal instinct to surface. The resolution is human, not transcendent. Conservative Christian families should know this going in.

The foster care system as institutional failure is a recurring backdrop. The social worker Wendy is sympathetic and competent, but she gets killed for it. The system puts Andy and Piper in Laura's home because Laura presents as normal. Nobody checks the shed where Cathy's corpse is in a freezer. The film does not use this as political commentary; it uses it as horror fuel. But the implication is consistent with a broader distrust of institutions that cuts across ideological lines.

Sally Hawkins is 59% audience approved on Rotten Tomatoes against 91% from critics. That gap is instructive. Critics are responding to the craft, and the craft is genuine: Hawkins, the Philippou brothers' direction, Aaron McLisky's cinematography (cold natural light turning domestic spaces sinister), and Barratt's performance are all working at a high level. Audiences are responding to how the film makes them feel, which is deeply uncomfortable in ways that linger after the credits. Both reactions are correct. The film is well-made and difficult to sit through.

Is it worth seeing? If you are a horror audience who can handle the Philippou brothers' willingness to go to places other directors will not, yes. The film earns its discomfort. Hawkins's performance alone is worth the price of admission for anyone who takes acting seriously. If you are a conservative family looking for content guidance: this is an R-rated horror film built around a demonic possession plot that includes self-mutilation, drowning, and the death of a social worker. Not for your kids, and probably not for you either, unless you knew what you were getting into before you clicked.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Occult Ritual as Central Plot Engine (Non-Christian Supernatural Framework)	4	High	High	5.04
Institutional Failure / State Cannot Protect the Vulnerable	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Deceased Father as Revealed Abuser	2	High	Moderate	1.4
TOTAL WOKE				8.5

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Sibling Bond as Moral Anchor	4	High	High	5.04
Maternal Love as Story Engine (Even When Corrupted)	3	High	High	3.78
Protecting the Vulnerable as Male Heroism	3	High	Moderate	2.1
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				10.9

Score Margin: +2 TRAD