Bring Her Back Review: A Harrowing Tale of Loss Creates One of The Year’s Best Horror Movies

Horror movies focusing on grief and loss are nothing new in this spooky medium as both are prime territory for the supernatural to creep its way in. Following their initial directorial debut in Talk To Me, Danny and Michael Philippou have returned with a gut-wrenching tale that fuses the satanic with some very real emotional beats. Bring Her Back is a story that never pulls any of its punches and in doing so, cascades its way to become what is one of the best horror movies of 2025.

Bring Her Back begins with brother and sister, Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), as they come upon their father in the shower, having collapsed for reasons unknown and being pronounced dead on the scene. Thanks to Andy being three months away from turning eighteen, he cannot yet become the legal guardian of Piper, meaning that they will have to spend their time in a foster home until they hit that pivotal time. Brought in by Laura (Sally Hawkins), their new caregiver seems as perfect as perfect can be on paper but things seem awry when the siblings meet young Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips). From here, the brother and sister learn that they are a part of something supernatural that they never could have expected, irrevocably shattering their lives forever.

Bring Her Back is something of a masterclass when it comes to creating a dramatic story whose horror elements accentuate the drama, while simultaneously establishing skin-crawling beats that stay with you leaving the theater. To start with the dramatic elements, much of the heavy lifting comes from Sally Hawkins and her portrayal of a grief-stricken mother who never quite got over the loss of her daughter. Hawkins is at the top of her game here, going from kind caregiver one minute to malevolent force of nature the next as both sides of the same coin are totally believable. On paper, what she is attempting to do is by no means sane, but as a viewer, you are given more than enough reason to understand why she is following this dark path.

Of course, the large swath of supernatural shenanigans comes from the film’s unofficial mascot, Ollie. Jonah Wren Phillips does a disturbingly great job in this role who, despite being mute, brings the creepy atmosphere and horrifying moments that the story demands. There are more than a few scenes in the film that are so uncomfortable that fellow audience members in my screening were wailing, and those wails are earned. Bring Her Back includes things I have never seen in a horror movie before and I hope to never see again, but these scenes work well in terms of accentuating the terror that is taking place in Andy and Piper’s new abode.

Billy Barratt and Sora Wong as Andy and Piper respectively work well here, finding themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place as the pair are sometimes pitted against one another in some traumatic ways. Without diving into spoiler territory, one of the bigger complaints I gave cines in the form of Andy’s relationship with his father or more precisely, what wasn’t shown in this relationship. Andy’s parental issues become a big part of the story’s second half and had this relationship been further fleshed out beyond exposition, it might have hit that much harder.

Another place Bring Her Back excels is in the simply gorgeous cinematography. There are stunning shots throughout that will leave you thinking that the Philippou brothers had a much larger budget than they did, with the final shot being an encapsulation of this statement. Danny and Michael, much like in Talk To Me, had a clear vision of what they were hoping to achieve in Bring Her Back and they achieved it. I cannot wait to see what the brothers do in the future with bigger budgets and more studio-backing as they are already establishing themselves as masters of horror with limited resources.

Bring Her Back makes for a harrowing tale of dealing with death and moving forward in the face of an unspeakable evil. On paper, the supernatural stylings of the film almost seem too ridiculous to believe but the Philippou brothers make said stylings feel all too natural to this world. Bring Her Back earns its place not just as one of the best horror movies of the year but one of the best period.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Bring Her Back hits theaters on May 30th.