What would you risk to bring someone back? A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon what might be the sharpest horror movie of the year: Bring Her Back. This isn’t one of those films that scares you with cheap tricks; it drags you into a psychological whirlpool and a drama that cuts deep, like barbed wire wrapped around your heart. Directed by brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, the film blends VHS-style found footage that makes you question what you’re seeing with a supernatural tragedy that feels torn straight out of a Greek myth. That moment when a story grabs you and refuses to let go? That’s exactly what this is, with suspense that swells like a storm you can’t escape.
The Philippou brothers aren’t newcomers. With Talk to Me, they left everyone speechless, channeling the wild, chaotic energy of their RackaRacka YouTube days into something dark and magnetic. In Bring Her Back, they’ve refined their style, delivering an explosive mix of horror, drama, suspense, and a touch of black humor that slices through the tension like a scalpel. Nothing here is wasted: every scene pushes you forward, making you question where reality ends and the nightmare begins. It feels as if they distilled the anguish of everyday loss into something that detonates on screen.
And then there’s Sally Hawkins, the English actress who steals every frame. Her performance is a brutal emotional journey, shifting from a fragile therapist to a deranged force with chilling precision. Best performance of the year? It just might be—especially if you remember her Oscar-nominated work in The Shape of Water with Guillermo del Toro. Here, Hawkins channels that same vulnerability, but twists it until we’re dragged from tenderness to madness, making us feel every fracture in her soul.
The plot is a live wire, hurling twists that hit hard and linger long after the credits roll. At its core, Bring Her Back unravels the devastating emptiness of losing someone close—a theme the Philippou brothers infuse with their own personal grief, much like they did in Talk to Me, or as we saw in Zach Cregger’s Weapons, where death fuels the supernatural. Hawkins guides us through the stages of grief: denial whispering, rage exploding, and that blurred line where pain bleeds into madness. It’s a mirror of our own inner battles, amplified by paranormal forces that promise reunion but deliver chaos.
Water becomes a silent character in this nightmare, a symbol of life’s duality: nourishing one moment, drowning the next. Just as in The Shape of Water, where it bridged real and fantastical worlds, here it dissolves the boundaries between sanity and the abyss. The Philippou brothers wield it masterfully—turning shower water, rainfall, a pool, or a puddle into portals where the dead whisper back, echoing J-horror classics like Ringu, where water holds curses that seep into the living world. It’s a detail that demands a second viewing to catch every layer.
In many ways, Bring Her Back feels like the heir to Ari Aster’s existential horror, the imploding families and daylight terrors. The Philippou brothers take that legacy and saturate it with their own rawness, while A24 once again cements its role as the studio reshaping horror with stories that cut straight to the bone.
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