Recently orphaned stepsiblings Piper and Andy find themselves farmed out to an adoptive mother with a sinister hidden agenda. 

Welcome back, Horror fans, to another outing from the fine folks at A24 films, the second film from the Philippou brothers. Bring Her Back is a film heavy with tragedy and grief, but also a good deal of child abuse, so be aware of all kinds of serious trigger warnings. Make sure your cutlery is out of children’s reach, and let’s dive into this! 

So poor Piper (Sora Wong) is mostly blind, and clearly looks disabled with her wandering eyes and twitchy countenance, and the cane she clearly hates but definitely needs. Despite her shortcomings, Piper is a generally happy girl and always tries to (sorry) look on the sunny side of life, especially with her older step-brother Andy (Billy Barratt), who always has her back. Andy and Piper share a special bond; never once does Andy indicate he’d rather be doing anything other than protecting and helping Piper. Indeed, one of the major plot moments of the film is the secrets concerning their shared father that Andy always tried to keep from Piper. But we’ll get to that. Right now, it’s Andy and Piper, armed with truth and grapefruits against the world, especially when they come home from school together and find their father dead in the shower stall. 

They say children are quite adaptable and of course Andy would have to be if he expects to take care of both himself and Piper when he turns eighteen in a few months, but until then, the state wants to separate them and send Andy off to fend for himself on his own, and send Piper to a foster mother called Laura (Sally Hawkins). Andy, of course, is having none of this and does his best to insist that they be sent off to Laura together, which secretly relieves Piper. And really, expecting someone as disabled as Piper to adjust to the death of her only surviving parent, lose her beloved brother, and settle into foster care all by herself pretty much all at once, is just ridiculous and asking for trouble. 

So it seems Laura holds a whole bunch of open secrets in her place of residence, but the one at the forefront is the loss of Laura’s beloved blind daughter, Cathy (Misha Hewyood). Laura already has a foster child in residence, the so very weird-looking and even weirder-acting Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), mostly mute but oddly following Laura’s cheerful commands with the starved gaze of a needful animal. Laura still lives in the same home where her beloved Cathy died, drowned in the now-empty pool, while the locked shed nearby holds many secrets, with her cat Junkman occasionally providing discordant music whenever Oliver gets hold of him. 

Laura claims to be a counselor and has worked for the state with adoptive children for years, though seriously, she never should’ve stayed employed anywhere near children, for reasons

that become apparent rather quickly. You see, Laura has plans for Piper, and since Andy is intruding on those plans, the first thing she has to do is gaslight the ever-loving hell out of him, to get him institutionalized and out of the way. This woman tries to insist on the observance of strange old customs at the kids’ fathers’ funeral, yet also helps them assuage their grief by getting both Piper and Andy entirely drunk at her house afterwards. 

Laura encourages Andy’s horrified revisiting of the trauma his father inflicted upon him, takes it upon herself to ensure Andy is exhibiting several major classic symptoms of childhood tendency towards murderous behavior, and encourages Piper to cling to her in fear, from the purported actions of her own brother. Laura also has a tendency to ignore or apparently forget there’s a whole other foster child in her care, despite Oliver’s nasty eating habits and horrific appearance, which sets up a whole other case for Andy to mistakenly mistreat yet another person in his life, when Piper and Laura go out for a girls-only jaunt and Andy takes it upon himself to try and feed cantaloupe melon of all things to the red-eyed little terror. Things go from bad to so much worse when Andy tries to take Oliver to a doctor, and as soon as the demon-child crosses the white line that encircles Laura’s house, all shrieking hell breaks loose. 

Timing seems to be crucial to the plans Laura has for Piper, especially since Oliver’s apparently insatiable hunger is rising and his thin veneer of humanity is peeling off, and as it begins to rain and the pool fills, Laura is also coming apart at the seams in her desperation to have her daughter back. 

The film deals very heavy-handedly with some very weighted subjects, but at the forefront is of course, child abuse by elders they’re supposed to have trusted – Andy and Piper’s father, with his shower terrorism and hushed-up abuse; Wendy from the state adoption agency whose sole job it is to make sure those kids are placed with safe, reliable foster parents actually capable of taking care of them; even especially Laura herself, in her murderous demonic rampage but really, only with the best of intentions dear. Sure, there is an overlay of supernatural pretext and demonic goings-on in the film, but by and large, the real monsters are the human adults treating the kids this way. 

Laura’s very real grief at the loss of her beloved Cathy embodies the sentiment that ‘no parent should ever have to outlive their own child’, which in no way excuses the lengths Laura is going to, to Bring Her Back. 

Decide how far you might go with such a question, and see Bring Her Back, in theaters now!