Bring Her Back (2025)

I thought I saw promising signs to this one going in. The cowriting and codirecting team of the Philippou twins from Australia, Danny and Michael, previously gave us the raucous Talk to Me (and both incidentally were associated as crew with the revelatory Babadook). Sally Hawkins is a featured player, an actor who has worked well with Mike Leigh (Vera Drake, the amazing Happy-Go-Lucky), Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), and others. And the reviews I saw were favorable, if not enthusiastic, with a 7.1 ranking on IMDb from 128,000 viewers (I generally handicap rankings on IMDb for horror movies a full point, meaning Bring Her Back had the potential for 8.1 quality). Its reputation, in fact, made me a little afraid of what was increasingly a mandatory viewing. You can see I put it off awhile. Indeed, it’s not a picture to be looked at during dinnertime, as it has many gross and harrowing scenes of extreme violence and abuse. I should have remembered that Talk to Me bore themes of grief, depression, and trauma in its plot, because once again, in Bring Her Back, contemporary horror has rooted itself in grief, depression, and trauma. In this case, Laura (Hawkins) has become deranged by the death of her daughter Cathy, who was blind and drowned in their swimming pool (which has been drained during this movie, making it a dangerous concrete hole in the backyard). Laura was a social worker before Cathy’s death. Now she is a foster mother. In many ways this is a movie about the importance of the vetting process of foster parents. Laura takes in a blind Asian girl, Piper (Sora Wong), and, under some duress because Laura only wanted the girl, Piper’s older brother Andy (Billy Barratt), who looks like Mark Hamill in 1977. Laura also has another foster living with her, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who is a certain model of creepy horror movie kid, Deliverance style. The rest is mostly tiresome working out of the grief. I can’t tell you any of the details because they would be spoilers. The Philippous can supercharge their scenes with lively, kinetic energy, but I kind of wish they’d lose the grief, depression, and trauma business. Nothing that way in this movie felt remotely real, only more like pink frosting.

Talk to Me (2022)

Australian horror picture Talk to Me is packed full with a busy agenda: themes of grief and depression interwoven with a propulsive premise involving wild teens on the lookout for kicks. There’s a ritual to understand here a bit like the one in The Ring. Here’s how it works. Somebody got hold of an embalmed hand (so they say), which is encased in plaster or porcelain or something and all marked up with signatures and tags. They say it’s the severed hand of a medium. And it’s a left hand—yes, oh, the “sinister.” You take it in your own left hand, like shaking hands with it, and you say, “Talk to me.” Then you say, “I let you in.” What could possibly go wrong? Novices to the bit are strapped in to their seats because the visions are intense, different for everyone, and basically anything can happen. And lots of things do. In the clinch, what it reminded me of most were 13-year-olds at a summer camp I was sent to who had figured out how to “faint” one another, via hyperventilation and chest compression. It was dangerous, of course, but we whooped it up as each wanted a turn and slumped to the ground. I’ll never forget the sensation of being out for a few seconds that felt like weeks or months and a trip abroad. I’m not sure whether this Talk to Me routine is more dangerous—well of course it is. It concerns matters beyond our ken and severe things happen to these wanton experimenters. That’s why it’s horror. Times being what they are, it gets all mixed up with some stuff Mia (Sophie Wilde) is going through. Her mother Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen) recently committed suicide and her father Max (Marcus Johnson) has not been honest with her about it. As anyone might have predicted, the spirits these teens are conjuring at the other end of the hand do not mean any of them any good. Talk to Me is actually quite good on that point and there are some appalling things these spirits do—not just physically knocking some of them around, but even worse lying to and manipulating our favorite teens just when they are most vulnerable and likable. You hate to see it but you love to see it. Talk to Me is a bit muddled about its directions, but worth a look for the high-octane energy.