‘Bring Her Back' Proves the ‘Talk to Me' Guys Aren't One-Hit Wonders
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.
More from Rolling Stone
'Karate Kid: Legends' Is a Kick for Hardcore Fans Only
Wes Anderson's 'The Phoenician Scheme' Is One of His Best
Mia Threapleton Idolized Wes Anderson. Then She Became the Breakout Star of His New Movie
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.
Best of Rolling Stone
The 50 Best 'Saturday Night Live' Characters of All Time
Denzel Washington's Movies Ranked, From Worst to Best
70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Review: Nicolas Cage Goes Full 'Groundhog Day' Thriller in 'The Surfer'
A surprisingly low-key Nicolas Cage performance anchors The Surfer, a throwback revenge thriller with a jet-black comedic edge from Vivarium director Lorcan Finnegan. For about 40 minutes, this film is an intriguing and even propulsive B-movie programmer. The first act is an efficient revenge setup, infused with some lush photography (the picture was shot on location in Melbourne) and an authentic grittiness which recalls '70s Antipodean grindhouse classics. But unfortunately, like all exploitation riffs which make the mistake of taking themselves too seriously, The Surfer goes on far too long and eventually exhausts its audience. Cage plays the titlular character, an unnamed office drone who whisks his son (Finn Little) to an idyllic coastal spot in the community where he was raised. The Surfer wants to buy a home overlooking the beach, the very same one in which he lived until age 15, when his father died and his mother moved the family to California. Hoping to take his son out to catch a few waves and an enviable glimpse of their new abode, he's instead met with some hostile 'localism' from the beach's resident muscle heads who are engaged in a bizarre salt-water cult overseen by Scally (Julian McMahon). At this point, The Surfer takes a detour into the sort of nightmare comedy about which you can ask no questions. Why, after being violently rebuffed and humiliated in front of his son, does Cage begin living on the beach in his car? Why does he keep returning to receive fresh injuries from the cult members? Why not just grab an Airbnb near his new home? What's up with the old man, also living out of his car, who's passing around flyers advertising his missing son? And why, after stealing his surfboard, do the cult members claim they've had it for seven years? There's a lot going on in The Surfer — the broken relationships of fathers and sons; the seeping wounds of male ego; mid-life malaise; the unexplained possibility of time loops — but none of it develops into anything. It's long been the safe haven of marginally talented filmmakers to produce a hallucinatory, vaguely existential film of dubious quality and pass it off as the vision of an auteur; but when the quality isn't there, it's all terribly transparent. Instead of interrogating or developing any of the ideas to which the film gestures, Finnegan visits a succession of increasingly outlandish humiliations onto his title character, all of which seem tailor-made for Cage's particular acting style. Watch him drink dirty water from a puddle (and later a public toilet)! Wince as he jumps onto broken glass! Shudder when he pawns his late father's watch for a flat white!The screenplay, by Thomas Martin, doubtless sent its cast and crew into fits of giggles. None of that mirth translates to the screen. By the time Cage swings a live rat by the tail (which he later beats to death and pockets for a snack) and attempts to shoot a dog in the head, you'll likely wish the whole thing would end so you can go home. Sequences which seem designed to provoke a strong emotional reaction pass without impression, boring instead of outraging. The climax is so foregone and uninspiring that your mind may wander to your shopping list in the film's final moments. It's worth mentioning that there's an admirable nastiness to this movie, and one gets the sense that Finnegan would do nicely with a straight, no-frills suspense piece. There's a queasy quality to the beach bullies that wouldn't be out of place in a home invasion movie, and before it goes off the rails, the film chugs along with a nicely suspenseful rhythm. There are even fleeting moments where you see in Finnegan's approach something of the efficient, genre-literate subversion Steven Soderbergh accomplishes so effortlessly. But what's the point of it all? Considering most of its business will presumably be done on streaming, it's odd that The Surfer so frequently tempts its audience to tune out. Unfortunately, the temptation stems not from the visceral impact of the travesties visited upon Cage (none of which truly land) but rather from the intense feeling of déjà vu. For all of its excesses, we've seen this done many times before and frequently better. The Surfer is currently in cinemas.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
‘Final Destination: Bloodlines' Is the Highest-Rated Series Installment on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's Why You'll Love It
Gorehounds rejoice, for Final Destination is back and better than ever. After a whopping 14-year hiatus, the Rube Golderbergian Death-as-slasher horror franchise, a progenitor to the Saw mill and subsequent run of dubious 'torture porn' titles, returns to cinemas just in time for the franchise's 25th anniversary. Final Destination: Bloodlines is the sixth installment in one of the horror genre's most consistent franchises, in which attractive teens survive a deadly disaster only to meet their demise as Death works to balance his scales. There are some less-than-interesting sequels, but most of them are terrifically entertaining and all are eminently rewatchable. This one is better than most, and it's resolutely the best installment since Final Destination 2 (2003). Mild spoilers heralds a fresh direction for the series, which last graced cinema screens in 2011. Fans of the franchise will still get what they came for, namely a succession of truly icky kills, but those less familiar will be surprised to find the story more nuanced and compelling than your average gore epic. But worry not, mayhem is still the name of the day. There's a positively hysterical gag involving a soccer ball and a garbage can; and the sequence in which a super-magnetized MRI machine attracts both a wheelchair and someone's bodily piercings will make you squirm with delighted anguish. The picture opens with a well-produced flashback to the 1950s. A young woman and her boyfriend head to the grand opening of a building which greatly resembles Seattle's Space Needle but is emphatically, legally not the Space Needle. Of course, because this is a Final Destination movie, things go terribly wrong. We then awaken with college student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who's been haunted by a recurring nightmare showing her grandmother and grandfather killed in a building closely resembling (but assuredly not) the Space Needle. Though she's been estranged from them since her mother left the family, Stefani returns home to her father, brother, and extended kin to find out the reason for her disturbing visions. Stefani tracks down her reclusive grandmother, Iris (Gabrielle Rose), who's living the life of Laurie Strode circa 2018 in a wooded bunker. Iris reveals that Stefani's dream was Iris's own vision of a disaster, which she averted decades earlier. Because she saved so many lives, Death has spent the ensuing decades picking off members of their family — those who were supposed to die in the initial tragedy, and those who would never have been born if not for Iris's intervention. With the help of her bickering clan, Stefani must somehow break Death's chain of death. Really, it's all just dressing on which to hang the increasingly ghoulish murder set pieces, the franchise's raison d'être, and the reason we're all fantastic opening sequence, which comes remarkably close to surpassing the opening-disaster highlight of Final Destination 2 (2002), succinctly and rather brilliantly shows the audience how this installment will be different while reassuring them it will still be nominally the same. It's a bit of a thrill to see a Final Destination film with proper costumes and set design, where the characters aren't just early-to-mid aughts teens with accompanying fashions. As it moves into its modern-day sections, the younger characters are aided by a cast of older and middle-aged adults, which adds an unexpected and welcome layer of emotional resonance to the proceedings. Far from the anonymous teen ciphers of the recent Until Dawn (2025), these are well-developed individuals whom the script takes time to flesh out before they're flayed. Whereas the previous Final Destination movies operated with an unerring, ghoulish cynicism, Bloodlines takes a decidely more heartfelt path. This is most clear in the appearance of Tony Todd, who's played the Death-savvy coroner William Bludworth in five installments. (He doesn't physically appear in part three, but does have a vocal cameo.) Candyman star Todd, who died last November at 69, is synonymous with the series and here is given a respectful goodbye. His single scene culminates in a sendoff which is so straight-faced you'll expect some sort of nasty punchline, but blessedly it never arrives. The movie plays the moment completely straight and pulls it off better than expected.A look behind the scenes gives some context to this ambitious jump in quality. The screenplay was co-written by Guy Busick, who's recently penned the horror hits Ready or Not (2019), Scream (2022), and Scream VI (2023). Though the execution of those movies was lacking, Busick's writing saved the day in each case. (Writer-director Lori Evans Taylor joined Busick at the keyboard). Most interestingly, Jon Watts, who directed three Marvel Spider-Man movies, including No Way Home, is credited with writing the story and with producing. Busick and Watts understand what works about the series and don't wish to change it, but they're not afraid to get a bit subversive. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, who helmed the nifty sci-fi flick Freaks (2018), mostly do them proud. Bloodlines does have its issues. It may be a great Final Destination movie, but it's not a perfect motion picture. At 110 minutes (the longest franchise installment to date), it could stand to lose about 15 minutes. There's a bit too much running back and forth in the middle movement, and the film lacks the pared-back, sub-90-minute satisfaction that so many of the sequels achieved. And despite the clever design behind the death scenes, CGI blood and gore are never as satisfying as their practical counterparts. A theoretically grisly lawnmower gag plays with muted effect and would have had more heft with the inclusion of some proper latex and rubber. Ultimately, though, Bloodlines is exactly what fans of the Final Destination series are after. It's fun, it's bloody, and it'll make you look at vending machines, revolving doors, and bottles of beer with renewed suspicion. And above all, it's always a delight to see a horror reboot treated with respect by the filmmakers, rather than as a cash-grab one-weekend wonder. What more could you ask But let's not go 14 years without seeing each other again, all right?
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Which ‘Final Destination' Is the Best? All 6 Installments (Including 'Bloodlines') Ranked From Worst to Best
After a 14-year hiatus, the Final Destination franchise returns to cinemas with the franchise's sixth installment, Bloodlines. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein's update-cum-soft-reboot has scored franchise-best critical notices, with our review noting it's 'exactly what fans are after' and a perfect entry point for newcomers while also providing ample fan service. One of the most consistent franchises ever produced (there's no outright bad installment in the Final Destination series, just some less-than-stellar ones), the films roundly follow a teenager who has a psychic vision of a terrible, mass-casualty event before saving most of the people whom Death is about to claim. But, unfortunately for them, Death likes to have his way and sets out balancing the scales by knocking them off in excessively grisly accidents, most of which involve formerly benign household implements like beer bottles and cuticle scissors. With Final Destination: Bloodlines now in cinemas, we've ranked each movie in the Final Destination series from worst to best. Do you agree with our picks?At a merry high school graduation party held at an amusement park, Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) envisions a deadly rollercoaster crash. After saving her friends, Death begins picking them off one by one. Part one director James Wong returned to helm this second sequel, but it proves only that Wong misunderstands the series he helped create. There's an odd line of leeriness which runs through this one, which dooms the female characters to the most gruesome fates and casts all the male figures as hollering, pumped-up bullies of different stripes. There's fun stuff here, like a grisly nail gun gag, but it's the closest the series has come to being an outright drag. Whilst enjoying the reverie of youth at a NASCAR event in this fourth installment, Nick (Bobby Campo) envisions a grisly crash in which the stands are wiped out. After saving his friends, Death begins picking them off one by one. Incredibly cheap-looking but undeniably fun in a no-frills exploitation kind of way, The Final Destination sees part two director David R. Ellis return for another round of carnage — this time in 3D! The addition of another dimension (several months before the release of Avatar, no less) gives this sequel a bit of a jolt, though the amateurish acting and achingly overlit color palette (to counterbalance the darkening effect of 3D, one assumes) give the whole enterprise the feeling of a cheap Syfy channel on a corporate retreat, Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) envisions a horrific bus crash which claims the lives of himself and his co-workers. After saving his friends, Death…well, you get it. The second installment to receive the 3D treatment, Final Destination 5 is a particularly clever sequel that proved the franchise still had legs. Directed by James Cameron protégé Steven Quale, the film is notable for two reasons: It introduces the oft-derided twist that its characters can cheat Death's plan by killing another person, therefore adopting the time they have left; and it ends on a terrific twist which, at long last, ties the franchise together. It's too good to spoil here. Embarking on a class trip to Paris, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) envisions a disaster which claims the lives of everyone on their flight. After the survivors begin dying in bizarre ways, Alex and fellow survivor Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) set out to unravel the mystery behind Death's plan. Final Destination is a very good post-Scream teen chiller, but it's just an above-average Final Destination movie. After you've seen the sequels and have an awareness of the franchise's general concept, it feels as though this first installment takes altogether too much time to get to the point. Despite clever set piece design and some very fine acting, Final Destination feels like an outline of itself. There are just brief flashes of the Rube Goldbergian antics that would arrive in sequels; only one sequence achieves the silly yet visceral terror that the franchise would soon by disturbing visions featuring her grandmother as a young woman, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) returns to her estranged family to figure out why Death has his sights set on them. An exceptionally well-tuned sequel. As fun as the Final Destination series has always been, few would argue that they were genuinely good movies with proper arcs and character development. Quite surprisingly, Bloodlines reverses course and delivers a Final Destination movie which is unabashedly gruesome, terrifically silly and overwrought, but admirably heartfelt and well-produced. A great deal of thought went into this sequel, and it shows. On her way to a spring break getaway, Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) envisions a gruesome highway pileup. She teams with a cop (Michael Landes) and original survivor Clear Rivers to put a stop to Death's plan. Unequivocally the most fun and most disgusting of the Final Destination flicks, stuntman-turned-director David R. Ellis's cracking sequel kicks off with one of the best car crash sequences ever put to film and gains speed from there. There is a gleefully politically incorrect, Italianate video-nasty quality to Final Destination 2, which makes rewatching it even two decades later feel taboo and slightly indecent. That's a huge compliment, by the way.
