Bring Her Back brings back the frights from the dynamic horror duo, Danny and Michael Phillippou. Having been one of the many who witnessed the impressively disturbing Talk to Me, the truly charming fellas may have outdone themselves. Last Friday, journalists and influencers were invited to check out the new trailer. We also saw a couple of scenes that instantly garnered an intense reaction.
Bring Her Back features the exceptionally talented Sally Hawkins. Billy Barratt, Olga Miller, Jonah Wren Phillips, and others. Much like Talk To Me, the film puts its characters through tension-laden trauma. And yes, the footage was beyond impressive. I was legitimately uncomfortable during one severely haunting moment. And apparently, it gets much more intense.
The plot on IMDB states, “A brother and sister uncover a terrifying ritual at the secluded home of their new foster mother.” Having seen something quite unsettling involving a young boy, a cat, and an empty pool. While it’s not graphic, it certainly sets the mood appropriately. Ms. Hawkins looks utterly stunning here.
It was the second scene that shocked the audience. Look, I won’t tell you much – although if you don’t want spoilers at all, you should avoid a couple of them below. It involves food, a knife, and a particularly hungry character. And holy hell, did this get me hyped for the horrors coming our way? Absolutely! It would be a massive disservice to you, fine readers, to reveal more. Avoid spoilers as much as you can for Bring Her Back. I’m officially more excited for this flick than any other this year. Bring on May 30th, 2025!
After the presentation, Danny and Michael took time to discuss their latest. In a very engaging and humorous question-and-answer session, the two took the stage in one of the creepiest theatre set-ups I’ve enjoyed attending. More on that soon.
With May 30th coming soon, the Phillippou Brothers revealed how much of the project is complete. But there is a mild spoiler warning for their answer involving the footage:
When it came to the heartbreaking inspiration behind Bring Her Back:
Yeah, we’re 95% done. We’ve got some sound design stuff that we’re doing, and music. Then, as soon as we land, we go back to Australia tomorrow or the day after, and then we go straight into the final mix, and that’ll be two more weeks of really doing the final touches sound wise. Then the movie will be done, which is crazy.
It’s been a really crazy journey of a movie, but I hyper-fixated on discovering or playing some sounds that you haven’t heard before. So even with that sequence you just watched. We couldn’t get the sound design. We’re like, how do we get the sounds of actually eating a knife? And then Danny, for some reason, started eating a knife. Sounds pretty good, though.
We were in the middle of writing Bring Her Back, and my cousin lost her 2-year-old, and we were in the hospital, and I was seeing her on the bed holding this kid. The family was all around him, holding his feet, hands, head, and arms. And eventually, over time, everyone let him go, and my cousin was the last one to let him go.
Horror is a fun way to look at dark things like that. And the idea of her never being okay ever again after that. That sort of was an inspiration point, as well as how far she would go to heal herself from it. And the idea of a never-ending grief cycle is terrifying to me. And seeing really raw grief like that is terrifying. And that just happened while we were writing, so that became part of the screenwriting process. And it always is a way to just express those things or look at those things in a fun way.
What they learned from directing Talk to Me when it came to their follow-up:
I guess we had the experience of doing a movie, but we’ve done a movie before. I think when we were first on set for Talk to Me, even the crew, I think, was like, they didn’t take us seriously though. No one took us seriously, which is good. And then, during this shoot, the crew kind of had this sort of respect almost then, but that was external. Internally we came up; we had no idea what the fuck we were doing. That’s how it feels. It feels like it’s just as unknown and as scary. It’s just just as daunting. It was more anxiety-ridden because you have A24 let down, you have Sally Hawkins let down. It’s like everything that you do; there was extra pressure to it, so I felt more pressure on this one than there was on Talk to Me.
Everything just goes out the window, and it feels like you’ve never made anything. And then you’re in the deep again, and you feel like you’re drowning again, and you’re like, oh wow, fuck do we put ourselves through this again? And then at the end of it, you come out, and you’re talking about it, and the film’s done, and it’s always a painful but rewarding process unless the film was really bad. It’s one of those things when it’s finally coming together now, really coming together, and yeah, we’re very happy with how it’s turned out. So yeah, we’re excited to show it.
On casting a visually impaired actor:
Yeah, it was so important to try and find an actual vision-impaired actor. We reached out to those communities, and we met with a bunch of kids. And the pool for that isn’t very big, 12-year-old vision-impaired actor. We did a thing where we ran through an exercise, we created a scenario and said, perform this. You normally would put yourself in the headspace of this character when this has happened. And then we just improved, and she blew everyone away. And she second-guessed herself a lot. We saw throughout the film her transformation from day one of never acting before to the final day where she looked like a seasoned pro. It was the most amazing thing to watch.
When it came to the gory details of the footage:
We had a bunch of rubber knives. He is actually eating it, and we had close-ups and things like that. Then we built a dummy head, one that we could cut through to his upper lip. And that was a real knife stabbing in there and moving it around, getting around that. And so it was like trying a bunch of different things. We have in our heads how we want it to look. And then, when you’re shooting on the day, you try new things as well.
So we adjust constantly. But there’s a way to attack the scene in four different ways and then piece together the most effective ways because there’s always an element of unknown. Is this going to work? Getting everything prepared, the actors are all coming, everyone’s expecting something. And so that’s part of the fun of it, to allow a lot of time that day to try to figure out how we’re going to put the sequence together.
Amazingly, I can promise you there’s a lot more hardcore stuff in this movie. It’s not the most intense thing you’re going to see.
When it came to the strange images projected on the walls of the theatre:
That’s a really fun part of when you’re writing, which is designing your own mythology and your own law and going really in-depth and building bibles out and writing out so many things. We did it with Talk to Me as well, and we did it with this film, and we always loved not over-explaining everything, like having hints of things and audiences and piecing things together. And I think I’ve read two comments online on Talk to Me that nailed it. They’re like, what the fuck? Which is so much fun.
I like the mythology being a little bit cryptic and a little bit unknown. And it starts as part of this as well. There’s our ritual tape, and it’s sort of an aversion. There’s a character in this that has childhood footage, footage that she looks back at, and it’s that sort of a healthy way of grieving and processing something. And then there’s the inversion of that, which is this upside-down macabre version of grieving. And so that was the idea of [the footage]. And it plays into what’s happening at the house.
