In the Flesh: Bring Her Back

There’s no big twist in Bring Her Back. From about ten minutes in we understand what Laura’s trying to do. An attentive viewer might pick it up even earlier, during the cold open in which unnamed Russians perform obscure occult rituals on screaming, dead-eyed subjects in an abandoned warehouse. The film isn’t trying to get one over on its viewers, it’s trying to hold them face-down in its own metaphorical puddle, making them feel the moral enormity of what’s happening in front of them, making them think twice about the system that enables it. It pulls its final punch, to its own not-inconsiderable detriment, but even compromised, this is one hell of a flick, and its willingness to grab onto real ugliness with both hands and ride it almost to the finish line is no small part of its power. That it’s gorgeously shot and anchored by fantastic performances doesn’t hurt either.

The film’s young leads, half-siblings Piper (Sora Wong) and Andy (Billy Barratt), are thoughtfully observed and immediately engaging, but it’s Sally Hawkins as their foster mother, Laura, who gives the marquee performance here. She’s the kind of unstoppable, emotionally difficult woman you see a lot of in childcare, ignoring boundaries, love-bombing, projecting wildly onto the children under her care. Not since Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes has a middle-aged woman projected this kind of intimate, unpredictable danger. Bring Her Back is deeply concerned with the relationship between adult women and children, the ways in which women make their children extensions of themselves, in which they control and torment children for breaching that illusion. The foster system is only a hunting ground; women like Laura are the predators.

In the last few scenes of the film, it steers away from the tooth-grinding tension and emotional nastiness that drive it for a surprisingly graceful and only partially successful ending. The moment Laura finally sees herself for the lunatic she is hits hard, but it feels hollow that it’s all it takes to bring down the whole nightmarish house of cards. Still, it’s a small narrative stumble in an otherwise ruthlessly paced and relentlessly stressful film, and there is beauty to be found in the image of Laura clinging desperately to her dead daughter’s frozen corpse. Bring Her Back is meaner, leaner, and more thematically and textually accomplished than directing duo Danny and Michael Philippou’s debut, and its arrival proves conclusively that Talk to Me was no hit of the moment.