‘Bring Her Back’ Review. Every image, nails on a chalkboard…

Death is a pebble dropped in a swimming pool, the ripples of grief spiralling into waves that are capable of knocking down anybody attempting to swim against them. It’s horror’s stomping ground, the eternal struggle of the living to cope with the loss of the dead, and the ends at which we’ll go to in order to try and overcome that immovable rock.

Bring Her Back, the followup to the Philippou brothers’ devilishly fresh directorial debut Talk To Me, strikes you in all the worst places (complimentary.) It’s violent and visceral in every sense of the word, wreaking gory trauma on the bodies of its characters and emotional trauma on their hearts.

It begins by introducing you to two troubled half-siblings moments before their father’s death. You instantly warm to them, the innocent charm of the partially-sighted Piper (Sora Wong) watched over by her protective and fundamentally kind brother Andy (Billy Barratt.) Once they arrive at their new foster mother’s (Sally Hawkins) home, you’re tensing up. It wastes no time in telling you Andy is not welcome here, and that beneath the home’s warm interiors and beyond its dusty windows, somewhere within that overgrown garden, lies a chilling secret.

Once it gets into its horrific swing, every scene is about doing a number on the viewer with fresh and grotesque, nails-on-chalkboard type imagery. The house of horrors itself is brilliantly detailed, its warm textures making an intriguing backdrop for ritual and sacrifice, Hawkins’ soft and charming demeanour weaponised with unexpected, unsettling cruelty.

None of that quite keeps this from feeling like familiar ground – grief as trauma that extends beyond the grieving. When does horror not touch upon the boundaries between living and dead? The film’s lasting effect on you, bar the nightmare fuel of its gruesome setpieces, is diminished a touch by that lack of original perspective. The twists in the story don’t make you lurch quite as much as the scares. The character’s don’t stick the knife in as much as the special effects and sharp turns in performance.

But as an effective stage set for visceral horror, anchored by an exhausting and tempered performance from Sally Hawkins, it has you clutching your face and watching through your fingers. By the time it ends though, it’s a feeling of heavy sadness you’re left with, more than a spooky thrill. It’s contained, brutal and relentlessly dark, the rain too heavy for even an inch of sunlight to squeeze its way through.