Do you ever get the feeling that filmmakers are pulling their punches? The action sequences are too distractingly edited, the jokes hemmed in just as real delirium takes hold, the romance pumping the breaks before things get genuinely steamy? There’s no genre that’s as familiar with half measures as horror, where most flicks walk right up to the ledge of true nightmare fuel before abandoning the quest all together, retiring to safer, less alienating pastures. The Australian writing and directing duo of Danny and Michael Philippou, referred to collectively as RackaRacka, are a lot of things, but quitters they are not. Their 2023 breakthrough, Talk to Me, was defined by an inexhaustible will to rev its own terror-inducing engine, pacing and subtlety be as damned as their characters. Given the extremity of the debut, you’d be forgiven for wondering if the pair had painted themselves into a hairraising corner of their own making. Turns out there’s ample room for further revulsion. You just have to keep burrowing.

All that subterranean digging can only lead to the gates of hell, which is exactly where Bring Her Back lays its scene. Requiring a foster home after the unexpected passing of their father, Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger, sight-impaired sister Piper (Sora Wong) are quickly taken in by Laura (Sally Hawkins), a surrogate mother whose outward-facing warmth comes with a few asterisks. Still grieving over a recent passing in her own family, the would-be matriarch’s isolated estate doesn’t exactly instill confidence, and that’s before we meet the other child in her care, a mute, wide-eyed boy named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). She’s determined to drive a wedge between the siblings, though Danny and co-writer Bill Hinzman are elusive when it comes to Laura’s motivations. If you’re hoping they’re saintly, this might not be the film for you.

Apologies for the light spoilers, but anyone who’s paid attention to the last decade of fright flicks knows the score, and Bring Her Back is notably disinterested in hiding its inspirations. The clearest point of comparison is the original Dutch version of Speak No Evil, which shares both the silent youngster and cursed sleepover scaffolding, not to mention a worldview that borders on nihilism. Another is Ari Aster’s Midsommer, whose playbook of foregrounding familial tragedy before whisking its protagonists off to dangerous, unfamiliar territory is followed like a road map. There’s no need to single out a specific feature to stand in for horror’s recent obsession with trauma; at this point, watching filmmakers delve into the subject between jump scares has become the price for entry. Narratively speaking, the Philippous’ latest is built from spare parts, which aligns it succinctly with Talk to Me. Both movies know what the audience is really here for, and go nefarious lengths to not distract or disappoint.

Their overeagerness to ‘please’ is present from the first frame, flashing a grisly image on screen before the title card has even dropped. Everything else follows apace, and if there’s one true detriment to the film, beyond its dependance entrenched structures, it’s in the omnipresent prioritization of making the audience’s skin crawl. The specific brand of devastation that’s being traded in here may be mundane at this point, but there’s still plenty of drama to be wrung out of such unenviable circumstances. RackaRacka leave plenty of meat on the interpersonal bone, but when you’re feasting this furiously on lurid torment, there probably isn’t much room left for dessert.

In terms of quickened pulses, gripped armrests, and stilted breath, Bring Her Back is beyond reproach, a cruelly ingenious machine of torture and affliction. The imagery is consistently idellable and occasionally downright scandalizing, a delirious swirl of torment that benefits from being juxtaposed against a fairly rudimentary setting. Natural lighting and middle class living quarters generally connote celluloid safety, and the Philippous work overtime to break that sense of aesthetic trust into the tiniest of pieces. Rather than using jump scares and fake outs, the movie employs a blown out sound mix to bolster tension, the clinking of bracelets on a table, or a ball rolling thunderously down a hardwood floor, perching the viewer perilously on the edge of their seat. When it comes time to reap the returns of their excruciating investment, the brothers turn the heat up until it’s almost unbearable, with visceral viscera that’s best observed through the cracks in fingers. Good luck removing a certain kitchen-set sequence from your mind after its horrid deployment midway through the film. It might require invasive surgery.

There’s no bet-hedging here, no stolen winks to the crowd that could be misconstrued as signals of levity, and the cast matches this straight-faced gravity without exception. Hawkins’ disarming, indefatigable charm has always had a nebulous something or other humming just beneath the surface, and her work here simply inverts the recipe, bringing the abnormality to the surface and utilizing the charisma as a bedrock. It’s not a revelation so much as new shading for one of our most criminally underrated performers, with the onus on discovery falling to Barratt. Wholly believable as a confused, sullen teenager with an emotional quick trigger, he’s the true star of the movie, though the way Cinematographer Aaron McLisky frames those zits removes the potential vanity of that distinction. Wong and Phillips are just as credible, though watching thespians of their nascency undergo such vivid tribulations can’t help but bring depiction ethics to the fore. Anyone made uncomfortable by the notion of child acting in general will be frozen with their arms up in the air, a possible cinematic crime of which the Philippous are in no way oblivious. 

Bring Her Back is too expertly crafted to have simply ignored the feasible affront, and if you’re going against the grain of good taste, it’s best to have your ducks in a row. Intentionality is a defining feature here, even when the method behind the madness is too abstract to grasp on first encounter. The motifs of circles, water, and locked doors pop up at a frequency that’s undoubtably pointed in a specific direction, one that will hopefully be unpacked by cinephiles for years to come, though the term papers and video essays must wait for our hearts to stop racing. The whole experience will be intellectualized in time, but these wounds will need licking first. As sophisticated and accomplished as the Philippous are from a technical standpoint, their truest form is a two-headed attack dog, and everyone leaves the theater bloodied. It may not be a pleasant weekend matinee, but this is a take-no-prisoners proposition, and you can’t make something scalding without burning some flesh along the way.