Put Ari Aster and Robert Eggers aside for a moment: the new Horror Cinema, today, goes from Danny and Michael Philippou. The two Australian brothers, born in 1992 and with a career as a filmmaker and YouTuber behind, had already shown what interesting pasta they were made with talk to me, from 2022

Theme, the latter, which also occurs in “Bring Her Back – returns to me”, the second work of the Philippou who not only return to work in the frame of the genre, but go back the dose. Because this time there are no holds and the descent into the underworld is impervious and heinous, where ruthlessness is intertwined with a morbid brought to measure of pop cinema. Because what Philippoou do in commercial cinema – in the USA the film is distributed by A24, in Italy since 30 July with Eagle Pictures – no one does it practically anymore.

Bring Her Back terror – Back to me

INBISSED IN A form elusive, Bring Her Back – Back to me discarded and reversed continuously. Mister Mysterish mixes of horror folk traces, between possessions (demonic?), Cannibalisms and rituals, then bringing down the remnants of millennial subculture such as the Found Footage and the analog horror, with a movie in VHS which is at the same time expedient and further terror that hot in the rear of the thrill.

On the narrative address, whose final objectives are fereally hidden in the folds of a story only apparently without guidelines, there are instead sufficient clues. Suffice it to know that the brothers Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) are welcomed in the isolated house of Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former social worker and now foster mother. The two have recently remained orphaned and carry their good dose of problems behind. Andy the trauma never completely absorbed of a turbulent past, Piper an invalid condition as a visually impaired which, however, is not brake on its solerity.

However, at home with them there is also little Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who is silent, indecipherable and with a disturbing behavior from the first moment when it is located at the center of the frame. That much of Bring Her Back – returns to me revolving around this chilling appearance, the Philippou do no mystery, delimiting around the area of an increasingly progressive and more and more petty torment.

A distressing journey that spares nothing

And in this area (also real; there is a circle of white chalk that delimits the home) Andy and Piper find themselves victims of a gathering that is assault on the health of a sacrificial youth, expressed with relentless dynamics before psychological and then physical coercion. There are very few films that manage to take the intolerable with a chest with solutions, in fact, of great simplicity. No discounts are made to anyone, especially to the viewer, pungulated on the alive at every change of scene and conducted in a resistance test where the look is not the act of surrender.

Bing Back – Back to me, however, is not (only) a ruthless macabre dance. The Philippou work with a handful of elements almost all already there on the screen, in full view. A location, a previous, a unveiling. And from each of these they draw their best by reversing the order of the factors and enriching with signs and symbolisms to feed a disorientation that simulates the condition in which Piper is found.

But the fulcrum of the film remains the Laura of an unprecedented albeit always masterful Hawkins, a face that includes the reassurance of the maternal and its most abject negation. His character assimilates the kind repertoire of the actress and spits him outside contaminated by the seed of a pain that is the root of madness and distorted emotional scaffolding of the story. The only adult in the center of a main cast exclusively of children and adolescents, the subject of terrifying and upsetting harassment – also the performance of Wren Phillips is something that does not shake off easily. It is not secondary: to turn, make itself produced and distributed a similar work is always difficult.

BRING HER BACK – Back to commercial nature, perhaps discounts something, which after all, the affordable theme (the relationship with loss and motherhood) and the closed (more “resolved” of how much that of talk to me, which in the final had a vertigo to make the knees). But the journey is far from docile and the Philippou never want to take by the hand, if anything, challenge the gaze of an audience that is used to being reconciled. Things like this, in the playing field of a horror designed for large consumer, we have not seen them for a while.

VOTE: 8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzmvx1jnnuy