‘Bring Her Back’ brings with it the new princes of horror

All gather for the coronation of the new princes of horror, Danny and Michael Philippou, who have snuck in from under our noses to the surprise of many.

Bring Her Back is the sophomore project from director-writer-producer duo Danny and Michael Philippou. Even more so than their debut film Talk to Me, Bring Her Back is gory, scary, and a surprisingly vulnerable story. Full of traumas and powerfully moving thematic concepts, the film depicts remorse, death, and adolescence in Adelaide, Australia – the creators’ backyard.

The twins may be new to Hollywood and the film industry – which makes it even more impressive that their first film was picked up by A24 – but like many filmmakers, they have comfortably experimented with cameras from a young age. However, unlike many filmmakers, the boys recorded these early and provocative tales on their YouTube channel, RackaRacka, during the 2010s. Their flare for gore and their thin line between graphic horror and comedy shone like a morbidly intriguing spectacle on the website. The production and quality of these videos put them in a category of their own on the internet. As quickly as they became a cult classic with their depraved skits and elaborate stunt choreography, they were banned in certain territories of YouTube for not being advertiser friendly, which forced them to reinvent themselves as more “serious” filmmakers.

Talk to Me, released in 2023, opens with their signature brand of shock horror: a brutal knifing, and this visceral calling-card signalled their undiluted entrance into the feature-length horror genre. The all-Australian cast swiftly stunned audiences in the festival circuit, right before they played in theatres and began dictating our beats per minute and choking us with fear.

Bring Her Back […] traverses the lines of a psychotic, zombie-cannibal-vampire thriller and uses all of these rich ideas to embark on a personal story about the desperation and depravity of grief

The brothers have illustrated they have room for depth beyond their instincts for horror. Their first film presented a brilliantly unique allegory about drug addiction and abuse among young people. All this played out through the supernatural conduit of an inanimate hand. Bring Her Back is no different, as it traverses the lines of a psychotic, zombie-cannibal-vampire thriller and uses all of these rich ideas to embark on a personal story about the desperation and depravity of grief. When a child therapist and mother (played by the stunning Sally Hawkins) loses her daughter, she discovers dark, occult, snuff films detailing how she could bring her daughter back to life. For ritualistic purposes, she is willing to sacrifice multiple children to achieve this goal. The film becomes incredibly solemn, reflective of the fact that a family friend close to the Philippou brothers passed away while filming, who they commemorate in the credits.

In a recent, but now deleted, YouTube live with Danny Philippou – along with revealing that the “film was sadder than it was meant to be” – he talks about how the disturbing (and disappointingly arbitrary) Russian tapes in Bring Her Back were recorded on a grungy, handheld camera. Danny also mentioned how he involved himself, in full costume and make-up, in the hellish environment, embedding himself with the satanic characters in order to capture the carnage of the snuff film scenes. This level of commitment echoes back to the director’s YouTube era, in which Micheal Philippou would portray the brother’s monstrously insane iteration of Ronald McDonald – a series that would see the brothers supposedly “banned from every McDonalds in Australia,” according to Danny. Danny admits that Bring Her Back is far gorier and uninhibited in its violence than Talk to Me, and when you see the horrors that they put phenomenal young actor Jonah Wren Phillips in, it is hard to disagree.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that Sally Hawkins gives a performance in this film that is worthy of an Oscar

The level of acting on display within these films is nothing to scoff at. Phillips, who plays the unhinged Ollie in Bring Her Back, shocks even the most hardened of horror connoisseurs with the graphically oral set pieces his character mindlessly mutilates himself in. Billy Barratt, who isn’t Australian, gives a strong performance that could be one of the best of this year – he easily rivals any performance in this summer’s frankly inferior and disappointing horror-thriller hybrid, 28 Years Later. It is not hyperbole to suggest that Sally Hawkins gives a performance in this film that is worthy of an Oscar. I would give similar praise to Sophie Wilde from 2023’s Talk to Me, but her competition that year is far steeper than Hawkins’.

The director duo have a considered eye for their female characters, as they have a speciality for constructing these dynamically flawed and tragic women that try to embrace some dark, supernatural force, which usually delivers them fates worse than death. These women are Lady Macbeth-esque figures, which aligns the Philippou films with an almost contemporary understanding of Shakespearean structure and language – not disregarding their own dark little twists and turns, of course.

The way that these brothers dedicate themselves to showcasing the work of a mostly Australian cast and crew gives their films authenticity and homegrown passion – something that simply does not exist in modern horror films.

Danny and Michael Philippou have a passionate, refreshing eye and vision that is only matched by other future horror greats, such as Robert Eggers and Ari Aster. Within two films, they have shaken up audiences with images of graphic extremities that Aster would only pin up as part of a thematic master plan, and that Eggers would hide and shade in darkness and atmosphere. The horror of Bring Her Back, like Talk to Me, exists beyond its spectacles and captures the hearts and minds of its viewers with a sense of dread at the suffering on display. Talk to Me is the less heavy-handed film, with a conclusion that challenges the audience’s beliefs around death and the unknown. Bring Her Back is a gut-wrenching analysis of possession and free will, made greater with its plot and characters centred around adoption and disability.

Both Talk to Me and Bring Her Back design narratives around the relationship of life and death, and the desperations around the body and restoration

The duo’s wonderful cinematography focuses on a style of body horror that can be an inspiration from Cronenberg’s ideas around the “new flesh,” in reference to the way both films use technology to document their bodily horrors. They may also exist as continuations, of sorts, of this new renaissance of body horror – that hit mainstream appeal with 2024’s The Substance – as both Talk to Me and Bring Her Back design narratives around the relationship of life and death, and the desperations around the body and restoration.

Perhaps it is Bring Her Back that can help the Oscars to finally recognise the cinematic value of horror. Perhaps the future of horror cinema exists with two brothers, on the other side of the world, that started their filmmaking journey recording themselves as kids performing WWE moves in their garage. Now those same kids are filling out theatres and homes with screams of fear and shock, and distressingly directed acting chops, all coloured in the blood, sweat and tears of the two most exciting horror filmmakers to come out of the 2020s.