Bring Her Back Review
Bring Her Back is unsettling in all the best ways.
Bring Her Back will drag you slowly and deliberately into something quite uncomfortable .
Are you ready for that?
Plot
A brother and sister uncover a terrifying ritual at the secluded home of their new foster mother.
Good Points
Sally Hawkins
Billy Barratt
Sibling dynamic
Sound design
Trauma handled with seriousness
Bad Points
Slow first act
Oliver is too underexplored
Final act piles on twists unevenly
My Thoughts
It earns its discomfort.
The first half hour of Bring Her Back tested me a lot with how painfully slow it was, as it lulls you into thinking this is just another grief heavy horror with familiar beats we have seen so many times, before something shifts, and then it all starts to feel a bit off .
It goes from passive to full attention mode activiated, without you even realizing it has happened.
Sally Hawkins
She’s fantastic, and it is one of the best perfoormances in a horror movie I have seen since Toni Collette in Hereditary, where she manages to turn Laura into something that is difficult to pin down - she’s fractured, and held together by grief and ritual, convincing herself she’s doing the right thing - and sometimes that’s exactly what makes something unsettling, as you are watching her and trying to figure out where the line is - before realizing there isn’t one.
Billy Barratt is also excellent as Andy, where we witness a mix of anger and fear where he’s trying to hold things together, and you can see it all slipping before your eyes.
The horror isn’t external.
The fear in Bring Her Back doesn’t come from monsters or even the cult itself, as it’s in the manipulation - watching kids get emotionally cornered by someone who genuinely believes they’re helping - that’s where the tension sits here.
When the film does get violent, it all t feels inevitable, like everything was heading there the entire time.
Sound that irritates on purpose.
The sound design deserves real credit here too, because it doesn’t just support what is happening on screen, it actively works against your comfort - mouth sounds, static, little textures that shouldn’t matter but do, and you might catch yourself reacting to the audio more than visuals at times.
And speaking of the visuals, we get moments where the film shifts how it shows the world, especially through Piper’s perspective - it’s disorienting without being too much, and I liked that it adds to the unease without pulling focus.
The ending
I wasn’t a huge fan of the last 20 minutes ot so, as I felt the final stretch is where things wobbled a bit, where the film starts stacking twists, and not all of them feel necessary, and it shifts tone slightly, like it’s trying to do more than it needs to.
I didn’t hate it, but I noticed it, as what was controlled suddenly felt a bit too crowded.
Ambiguity works - until it doesn’t.
The ritual elements are intentionally vague om the movie - chalk circles, implied rules, fragments of something larger - which works brilliantly for atmosphere, but I personaly wanted a bit more clarity.
Same with Oliver - he’s interesting, but underexplored, and I found myself waiting for something that never quite came.
Slow, but deliberate.
The pacing will be a problem for some people, and I felt it too, but once it settles, that slowness starts to feel like part of the design, and by the end I though it built the tension in a way that faster films don’t really bother with anymore.
But what I really like most is that the film doesn’t treat grief like a gimmick like so many horror films of recent years do - it’s central, but everything grows out of it -Laura’s actions, as extreme as they are, make a kind of internal sense, for example.
Final Verdict
Bring Her Back is slow, uncomfortable, and occasionally frustrating, but it’s an interesting watch once it gets going with enough strong unsettling moments to carry it through its weaker moments.