Flasz On Film

If you’ve been following horror over the past decade, you’ve probably felt it too: the creeping sense that what once felt fresh now feels familiar. The wave of elevated horror—those slow-burning, grief-soaked, thematically ambitious films—seemed to erupt with Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook in 2014. It’s grown, peaked, and is now unmistakably beginning to curdle. 

I’ve written before about the biology of microtrends—how cultural movements behave like living things, growing, mutating, and eventually decaying. Watching Alexandre Aja’s Never Let Go helped crystallize that metaphor. And with each new release, my sense sharpens: elevated horror is in decline, not because the ideas are exhausted, but because filmmakers are circling back through terrain already excavated. The Philippou Brothers’ Bring Her Back is a perfect specimen—aggressively crafted, emotionally earnest, and yet somehow unmistakably derivative. 

In 2018, the Ari Aster-directed Hereditary took the world by storm with the combination of the intensity of its experience and the thematic depth imbued within the narrative. It was a truly incredible vehicle that skillfully juggled its obligations towards the genre of supernatural horror with its own desire to spark a conversation about grief and motherhood pressures. Aster’s movie was the perfect blend of tense dread and intellectual exhilaration punctuated with spikes of shock and horror that kept the viewer in a relentlessly sustained state of elevated anxiety. But the point of it was that it was just as extreme as it was accessible. A thrill ride that looked frightening and dangerous, yet it was still adequately controlled to ensure that wide audiences would come out on the other side unscathed. Changed, but unharmed. 

There is no debate that the Philippou brothers, who have recently released their stunning debut Talk to Me, were looking to Ari Aster for inspiration while getting ready to follow up with their most recent movie Bring Her Back. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I found out that they had in fact set out to make their own version of Hereditary, cheekily disregarding the simple fact that it had only been seven years since that movie was released. But they decided to treat it the way a nu metal band would have treated an 80s pop song while recording a cover of it—heavier, meaner, nastier, but structurally mostly unchanged.  

Therefore, you’d be excused if you had a vague sense of déjà vu while watching Bring Her Back because the movie closely resembles the Ari Aster piece. Let’s not call it a remake, but the movie feels like Hereditary’s younger, louder cousin—the one who turns up the volume but plays the same tune. The main points of differentiation are not in the what but in the how of it all, or more precisely in the way the how of it all went further and harder than Ari Aster in all possible respects.  

Thus, Bring Her Back establishes a seedling of grief early on in the story as a pair of siblings, Andy and Piper (played by Billy Barratt and Sora Wong, respectively) suffer from the sudden death of their father whom they find in the bathroom with his head split open, presumably as a result of an unfortunate fall. Naturally, social services get involved and they end up in foster care of Laura (Sally Hawkins), a mother who has recently lost her daughter in a terrible accident, who also takes care of another recent orphan named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). However, it quickly turns out that nothing is what it seems and that Laura has ulterior motives for her supposed generosity of spirit, as—which the title implies quite overtly—she has refused to accept her daughter’s death and instead she has studied ways of… well… bringing her back from the dead.  

But, in contrast to Hereditary, which handled a similar set of ideas, nothing is ever so simple. In Aster’s movie, the crux of the plot revolved around the concept of bringing a demon king Paimon into the plane of the living and giving him a young body to live in. Everything else—the supernatural events, the covens of witches, the works—stemmed from the fundamentally simple template of a possession horror infused with thematic messaging relating to grief, parental neglect and mental illness as relating to someone struggling with staying tethered to reality in which they lost a child.  

Bring Her Back stays in the same ballpark but instead chooses to complicate matters and stages the most convoluted possession horror you can imagine, as though the idea of “less is more” was worth defying with the conviction of a teenage rebel opting to wear shorts in winter only because their parents told them not to. It might take even a seasoned horror hound a few moments to figure out how this narrative works together with its many moving parts, cogs and levers. In what appears, at first glance, like a hodgepodge of visual elements magpied from all corners of the genre, we are drip-fed information relating to how Laura has been learning all about witchcraft from watching what looks like tattered VHS snuff videos and that the process of bringing someone back from the dead is much more involved than the combined body of horror knowledge might lead you to believe.  

It’s not as simple as reciting a few incantations, drawing blood, or collecting locks of hair—we’ve seen that movie. The Philippous aren’t here to regurgitate the canon; they’re here to complicate it, like a nu metal cover of a Eurythmics song. Laura can’t simply alienate the siblings and stage a battle for Piper’s soul. No—she needs to find a second child, summon a demon into his body, preserve the original corpse (because apparently the spirit lingers), make sure the new host dies the same way, then feed the demon-possessed child chunks of the original body, and finally, regurgitate that meat into the mouth of the fresh corpse. Voilà! She’s back. 

It’s clever, sure—but also exhausting. The ritual feels less mythic than bureaucratic, like a cursed Rube Goldberg machine powered by VHS witchcraft. At the risk of sounding dramatic, Bring Her Back is to other possession films what installing software on Linux is to MacOS: you start with confidence, then end up trawling forums, rewriting the kernel, and somehow breaking your keyboard backlight in the process. And the software still won’t run. 

And while you’re still parsing the layers of lore and logic, Bring Her Back throws violence at you with blunt force and relentlessness of a rabid honey badger. Where Hereditary used carefully positioned flashes of horror to jolt and disturb—relying on the viewer’s imagination—the Philippous take the opposite approach: they linger. Gore doesn’t flash—it festers. Close-ups of suffering stretch into mini endurance tests. Violence against children in particular is rendered with such realism and persistence that it becomes less about narrative stakes and more about testing the viewer’s tolerance. It’s hard to stay immersed when the film seems intent on repelling you and sending you running to the bathroom to spew your guts out. 

It’s just distracting, distressing, and borderline irresponsible. A mere ‘18’ certificate barely prepares audiences for the relentless carnage, especially when it involves children. Combined with the thick atmosphere and the dense sense of dread oozing from the narrative proper and its thematic undercoat, the gruesome violence might be too much for many viewers who may struggle to watch this kind of depravity—in extremely realistic detail, too—perpetrated against child characters. It’s honestly a tall order.  

For all its excesses, Bring Her Back is a competent piece of filmmaking, though. The Philippous clearly understand the mechanics of dread, and they apply their sensory chokehold with real flair, much like they did in the quietly brilliant Talk to Me. The child leads are strong, and Sally Hawkins leans hard into the unsettling caretaker role—even if it never hits the mad brilliance Toni Collette brought to Hereditary. But one can’t help feeling that we’ve seen this all before, and often in sharper, more disciplined form. The frequently deployed close-ups and the use of out-of-focus negative spaces combine well with the sound mixing to add to the sensory oppression exerted by the movie.  

The only thing I’d have done would have been to tone down the body horror by a tiny bit to make sure the viewer stays in the zone. And maybe I’d have rethought the principal concept of making the possession mechanic look like a horror show of installing new graphics drivers on an early version of Mandrake Linux; for the same reason: not to alienate the audience.  

Having imagined what it would look like, you’d get a banging movie… that you’ve seen before, because—as I alluded to in the beginning—Bring Her Back owes one heck of a lot to Hereditary and camouflages this relationship by amping these two elements, gore and plot complexity, way past any limits of good taste one would expect out of a product aimed at mainstream audiences instead of genre festival-dwelling gorehounds. However, even as it stands, the following realization is inescapable: for all the goodwill and inventiveness in the realm of execution, we’re now living through what will surely be referred to as the twilight of elevated horror.  

Bring Her Back regurgitates the same ideas and themes as so many predecessors have before it (Hereditary, Midsommar, The Night House and more) and falls back on playing the same well-recognizable chords as other movies did but lathered with a thick layer of distortion. It’s a fun gimmick, but something tells me—even though the Philippous assembled a much more competent film than recent imitators like It Lives Inside, Cobweb, or Imaginary—that audiences may still choose to stick with the vibes and ideas found in the movies that Bring Her Back manipulates because it doesn’t take the perseverance of a Linux enthusiast to follow their logic, nor does it require the stomach of a trauma surgeon to sit through them.