Bring Her Back

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Alfred Hitchcock was famous notably for “Psycho” (1960) among others because he implied many frights rather than explicitly illustrating them. Genuine horror gets its strength from what is hinted or suggested and not by what is shown. It is the mystery of the unknown that is truly frightening.

Thankfully, Michael and Danny Philippou (“Talk to Me”) know when to reveal and when to employ restraint. Their new film “Bring Her Back” is both a somber meditation on familial loss and desire and a Gothic tour de force. It is an excellent piece of the Grotesque as Art, and it is pushed to operatic heights by the superb dramatic force of Sally Hawkins in a leading role.

This is no flashy and cheaply rendered fright fest. One is compelled to watch from the very first frame. Seventeen-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (hSora Wong) are in foster care after the death of their abusive father. The two take a trip to meet the foster mother Laura (Sally Hawkins). Laura has a foster son, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). Laura reassures Andy and Piper that they’re just what she is looking for and they’ll feel right at home.

By all appearances, Laura is wonderful, warm, and generous with a kindly open face and quirky disheveled hair. Little do Andy and Piper know what they’re in for with Laura.

Straightaway, there is something off with Oliver. He is driven to violently attack housecats and eat insects.

A few mornings in, Andy wakes up with chalk on his mouth and urine on his pants.

First and foremost is the angst and the transfixing pain of Laura who raises the percussions of inner sadness and bitter envy to poetry. As a 21st century Minnie Castevet, Laura displays great whimsy and zest, only to turn poisonous and sadistic in an instant. Though at times Laura pokes at Piper playfully as if to test her plumpness and fatten her up like the Witch in Hansel and Gretel, the actor Sally Hawkins never goes straight to kitsch. Her sadness is propulsive, human, absolutely genuine and all the more painful. Laura is a witch left bereft. Within her twinkling eyes are the crow’s feet of loss. A sorcerer’s glee in the manipulation of mortals gives way to rage—scary, unbridled, unbound.

The gore displayed too is authentic, realistic and altogether meaningful, indicating melancholia and great suffering, rather than the disposable, the gratuitous or the excessive.

Every monster-making episode leads to Laura looking at a grainy VCR tape like a visual map to a frightful pirate treasure. As she looks at the unfortunate pale and painful, screaming souls on the screen, Laura eyes dance hectically in her head. She is searching for any lost galleon of a physical body that can house Cathy, her late daughter. Laura envies whatever is feminine, adolescent, or Disneyesque as evidenced by her chipped and glittering purple nails. All roads lead to the jejune Cathy, a Snow-White teen.

This is no Creature Feature. Every bloodletting, every roar and every chalk circle inscribes pathos and energy. The ritual itself seems opaque and unplanned driven by desperate envy and want: performance pieces that uncomfortably recall slaughterhouses and detention centers.

One is left to witness a bestiary within a cheerfully cluttered home.

Sally Hawkins with singular strokes creates a mother sequined in sadness and she twitches with every heart-rending bite of feeling.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com