Bring Her Back is just as catchy and exclamatory a title as Danny and Michael Philippou’s 2022 horror hit Talk to Me. So, you might be here expecting something with a similarly bold, crowd-baiting sense of glee. But where their debut – A24’s highest-grossing horror – was all squelchy, Evil Dead-esque gore with a few ideas about grief and trauma sprinkled in for the sake of respectability, their follow-up is a self-described sister film that feels almost its tonal opposite.
It’d be wrong to say that Bring Her Back is necessarily more mature, since somebody does something with a kitchen knife that’s so diabolical you can practically hear the YouTubers-turned-directors cackling somewhere behind the camera. And it’s just as sticky and visceral as Talk to Me. But while their first film was mean-spirited like a hell-born prank, this feels mean-spirited like a ruthless therapist tearing your psyche out chunk by chunk.
