The ‘Talk to Me’ Duo Beat the Sophomore Slump

What happens when you go from being gonzo suburban kids to D.I.Y. YouTube sensations to the duo responsible for a hip film company’s hugest genre hit? Having already made a name for themselves online under the collective handle RackaRacka, the Australian filmmakers/twin brothers Michael and Danny Philippou didn’t exactly come out from of nowhere when they dropped 2023’s Talk to Me on an unsuspecting public. But their story of teens who find a cursed, mummified hand and use the supernatural item to contact the dead as a party trick, ended up becoming A24’s No. 1 grossing horror movie to date. Suddenly these siblings from Adelaide officially became the Next Big Thing. Talk of sequels, spin-offs and an expanded Talk to Me franchise universe was rampant. Hollywood beckoned. You wondered what the brothers would do next. And you hoped they wouldn’t break up or flame out in the process of trying to follow up that kind of runaway success.

The good news: The Philippous somehow survived the experience of becoming the flavors of the month. The even-better news: They’ve delivered a sophomore feature that both proves they’re not one-hit wonders and that they’re capable of mixing things up. You wouldn’t exactly call Bring Her Back a move toward “maturity” for the 32-year-old filmmakers — there’s still a giddy energy behind some of the more outré moments in this tale of two teenagers who find themselves in the middle of some seriously shady shit. A sequence involving a boy, a butcher knife, and teeth suggests these gents still love to push the meter into the red. But there’s less of a livewire, look-at-us sense of attention-seeking that’s characteristic of new filmmakers desperate to make a mark, and more control, patience, and craftsmanship on display in this unsettling, semi-Gothic tale of grief solutions gone wrong. It’s still ready, willing and able to go to extremes. The restraint they show in between the adrenaline spikes and jolting dopamine hits, however, makes this a far scarier affair.

You may think that the somewhat stock, creepazoid cold opening, in which viewers seem to have stumbled upon a mysterious ritual involving circles, murders, camcorders, and naked fat guys stumbling around is a red herring. It’s simply a planting a seed; just put a pin in it for later. The two folks you’ll need to concern yourself with immediately are Piper (Sora Wong) and Andy (Billy Barratt). She’s a sight-impaired high schooler desperate to fit in with the cool kids. He’s her protective, super-supportive older stepbrother, and they have the type of relationship where a code word — “Grapefruit” — signals that one has to answer the other with complete honesty. The two are close. Which is good, because their father has just unexpectedly passed away. And while Andy is still too young to be her legal guardian, the woman assigned to their case throws them a break. There’s a household, run by an ex-foster counselor, that’s willing to take both of them in until Andy comes of age.

Their new parental figure is named Laura. As played by the great Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky, Paddington, The Shape of Water) she’s gregarious, a little daffy, and friendly in an obviously overcompensating, try-hard kind of way. And there’s something off about her from the jump. Laura’s daughter, who was also sight-impaired, drowned a while back; there’s a sense of surrogacy that borders uncomfortably on outright substitution regarding the way she treats Piper. Her likes include children, mysterious chalk circles around her driveway, and her dog — the pup is dead, but not to worry, she’s had him stuffed. Dislikes include boundaries, swimming pools (for obvious reasons), and Andy. The cheeriness she shows him is a front. She’s much more interested in his sister.

Oh, and there’s another kid residing in the home with them: Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). He’s 10 years old or so, and something feels very off about him, too. It’s not just that the boy doesn’t speak; he’s been mute since the accident, Laura tells them. Or that he seems particularly aggressive around their pet cat. It’s more of the way that Oliver sort of constantly hovers around the periphery, staring blankly at everything. He’s always there, yet somehow not really “there” at all. The fact that he needs to be locked away in his room when no one’s around doesn’t counteract your sense of unease. Nor does his tendency to bang his head bloody against his window or the door to the wooden shed in the backyard, which he’s seems rather fixated on. Or the fact that he only really perks up when Laura, while giving him a bath, acknowledges that “I know you’re hungry… you’ll just have to wait a little longer… .”

If you haven’t guessed by now, there’s a secondary agenda going on with Laura and some of the more cryptic occurrences happening on the premises. And while the logic behind some of the supernatural aspects of Bring Her Back is on par with the just-go-with-it leaps of faith employed in Talk to Me, it’s less about the how regarding the plot’s numerous hairpin turns, and way, way more about the when and why of it all. Trust us when we tell you that the movie has this title for a reason.

What is obvious is that the Philippou brothers know they’ve got a decent premise and and a strong cast on their hands. Both Wong and Barratt understand the assignments here. When you are blessed with a performer of Hawkins’ talent and abilities, you let her lean full-tilt into the unhinged elements of the character, the emphasis on mourning as a perpetually wounded state of mind, and the story’s curdled take on motherhood. We tend to view the whole creepy-youngster trope as overused and lazy in most cases, yet there’s something about Phillips’ way of playing this zombie of a kid that rises above the cliché. You’re compelled to watch him even when he’s in the background and allegedly checked out. And when the third act kicks into gear for him… yeah. Things get gnarly.

Bring Her Back is still a messy endeavor, even with what feels like a newfound discipline, not to mention a superior grasp of pacing and catch-release tension, happening behind the camera. That’s a feature or a bug, depending on how you like your horror served. But if their debut used grief as more of a superficial way to spice up the thrills and chills, this follow-up treats the concept as something bone-deep and gutting. When that enigmatic opening suddenly comes back around, you understand exactly why the means it represents might justify the aims behind it. You also breathe a sigh of relief that these guys aren’t simply out to shock for shock’s sake. The filmmakers want to jolt folks, for sure. But they also want to bring you to a place where the emotional after effects of that juddering linger long after the jump scares have faded away.