2022's Talk to Me was distinguished by the emergent Philippou brothers' readiness to push a fairly stock multiplex-horror set-up (mummified paw leads its teenage bearers to rack and ruin) towards extremes of behaviour: much like its bashed about young leads, survivors of homes so broken you could cut yourself on the pieces, you felt the film could turn properly horrible if it wanted to. Recognisably Australian in its rejection of the slickly polished surface for something rougher-edged, it bore few traces of the childproofing common to so much studio horror, and was therefore liberated to grab the audience by the throat. The directors' follow-up Bring Her Back, which arrives bearing the red flag of an 18 certificate, pushes yet further into the darkness: it's only a few minutes old when partially sighted pre-teen Piper (Sora Wong) and her older, tousle-haired stepbrother Andy (Billy Barratt) return home from school to find their father lying dead in the shower. The pair are quickly reshuffled into a foster home, where our sense of a fire/frying pan scenario is only heightened by the sight of Sally Hawkins (as the kids' new guardian Laura) at her most bohemian-scatty and manic, proposing drinking games as a bonding ritual and sneaking into her charges' bedrooms after lights-out to anoint them with her own bodily fluids. (After Hugh Grant's pivot-to-malevolence in Heretic, we are once more reminded of the lengths British performers are taking to shake off the genial stank of Paddington.) Yet these aren't the only elements that unnerve us. The stepsiblings gain a disconcerting new playmate in Laura's other foster child, a mute, shaven-headed tyke called Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) whose wild eyes suggest he's seen heinous things. And then there is the insinuation, slipped inside the opening credits, that this cluttered, colourful, lived-in foster home, with its ominous void of a swimming pool, was at some point in the none too distant past the site of a murderous cult.
What's truly transgressive about the Philippou approach is that they can't bring themselves to kill off their young leads, which might at least offer some cathartic release, but they think nothing of repeatedly shaking or beating them up. Neither of their films can claim a particularly high bodycount (certainly not by comparison to the I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot in the screen next door), but they go big on bruising and scarring, sustained physical and psychological violence, the kind of trauma sparked by such everyday phenomena as a rainstorm. The brothers aren't constructing mechanised slaughterhouses so much as suffocating pressure cookers. Even here, their Australianness shows through: the boys would appear to have spent their formative sleepovers studying the domestic horrors of Animal Kingdom and Snowtown, forbidden texts operating closer to home than any larkier Nightmare on Elm Street fantasy. Bring Her Back works hard to summon the dread one would associate with hearing an abusive parent coming up the stairs, and knowing that worse still awaits you at the bottom of the garden. There's still a measure of fun and games in watching this lopsided family drunkenly bouncing to Timmy Trumpet and Savage's "Freaks", and the brothers remain firmly committed to their actors: you don't hire Hawkins, and then hand her a monologue on what it feels like to lose a daughter, if you aren't. (They also demonstrate a fondness for resilient, non-cutesy juvenile leads who can take what's being thrown at them and thereby suggest the foster home more than they do stage school.) But - boy - do these guys know how to turn the dial and the screw: the new film is all intense naturalism until the moment someone takes a carving knife to their own mouth and starts tearing off strips of their own flesh.
Here's where Bring Her Back gets truly grisly, and I could well understand if you chose to recoil. I've seen multiple early responders who felt the film is too much, too dreadful; that it goes beyond being a film about exploitation to become an exploitation film (or an exploitative film) in itself. (I couldn't honestly recommend it if you have any of the following: sensitivities around cats in horror films, scheduled dental surgery, any connection - however tenuous - to this kind of material or news story.) You will find your own tolerances and red lines being tested, even if you emerge satisfied that no real or lasting harm has been done. I consciously held off assessing the final scenes of 28 Years Later because I'm intrigued to see how that plotline is developed (maybe even justified) in January's follow-up. I can, however, see how and why you might find that artistic choice glib, doubly so in a moment where the Epstein files have become a political football, and we risk having terrible abuses reframed for us as a game played by cartoon bogeymen. Yet I felt the Philippous were sincere in broaching this subject, and they again demonstrate a boundless sympathy for their put-upon kids; they're not going there for a laugh, rather out of a deep-seated concern for these youngsters, and the worst of what happens to them is framed, responsibly, as a tragedy rather than a snickeringly tasteless joke. (The thought did cross my mind that the Philippous may have intended to subvert a quintessentially Aussie image - that of Pippa and Tom Fletcher, the heroically perfect foster parents who were a foundation stone of much-exported TV soap Home & Away - but the filmmakers would have only been six when the characters were written out. I'm just old.)
If there are shortcomings with the new film - and I found it slightly less persuasive overall than I did its predecessor - they're not ethical but authorial. Talk to Me proceeded from what was a straightforward, (literally) easily grasped conceit: here's a mummified hand, watch as it brings about bad things. Bring Her Back is murkier and more complicated in most respects, and what it gains in shuddering impact, it loses in precision: for much of the running time, we're left in much the same position as Andy and Piper, unsure what's going on save that something's very badly up, and wrestling with the swelling unease in the pit of our stomachs. (I'm not sure everything is fully clarified by the time the closing credits run, though again that may well be a conscious choice.) I found Bring Her Back effective without for a minute thinking it would be a fun one to revisit (as a comparable ordeal like Heretic probably would be); it's effective at the same time as being intensely horrible. One can only hope the Philippous' relationship with their own parents or guardians is nothing but sweetness and light, that they're round there every weekend for a barbie that triggers nothing but laughter and ends with a loving and wholly consensual family hug. But anyone watching Bring Her Back this weekend will be given considerable cause to worry.
Bring Her Back opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.
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