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Toronto Sun
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Sun
REVIEW: Foster mom fosters nightmares in ‘Bring Her Back'
Published May 29, 2025 • 3 minute read Jonah Wren Phillips in "Bring Her Back." Photo by Ingvar Kenne / A24 Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. What's the opposite of a Venn diagram overlap? Whatever it is, 'Bring Her Back' is the film equivalent, with two potential audiences that might cancel each other out. Fans of horror movies that work your every last nerve may not appreciate the casting of the great British actress Sally Hawkins as a foster parent with a devilish agenda. By contrast, fans of Hawkins's work in art-house crowd-pleasers like 'Maudie' and 'Happy-Go-Lucky' – or even mainstream fare like 'The Shape of Water' and the first two 'Paddington' movies – may run screaming from the theatre. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account All well and good, and forewarned is forearmed. 'Bring Her Back' is the second feature from the Philippou twins, Danny and Michael, who rose from making shock-comedy YouTube videos in their home country of Australia to becoming the next big horror auteurs before they turned 30 by writing and directing the 2022 surprise hit 'Talk to Me.' Like that film, 'Bring Her Back' is close to, but not quite, a triumph of style over substance – foreboding, unnerving and ultimately very gooey in ways that linger like the aftermath of a bad dream yet lack the nightmare cogency of truly great horror. Unease and inexplicability both turn up early, with stepsiblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) traumatized by the sudden death of their father (Stephen Phillips) while taking a shower. What killed him? Don't ask. Where's their mother? Doesn't matter. Threatened with separation by social services, the two make their case to remain together and are assigned Laura (Hawkins) as a foster mom. In Hawkins's performance, Laura is chirpy and chatty, the kind of sunny sort who gives positivity a bad name. (If you've seen 'Happy-Go-Lucky,' Mike Leigh's wonderful 2008 movie in which the actress plays a born optimist, 'Bring Her Back' is like the other shoe dropping; the two films would make one hell of a double bill.) Piper is almost completely blind – the filmmakers play the actress's unfocused eyes for additional creepy vibes – and by coincidence (or is it?), Laura had a blind daughter who recently drowned in the swimming pool out back. Glimpses of a VHS tape detailing some kind of horrifying Slavonic ritual keep the tension tight. Is Laura in some kind of cult? If so, what does it, and she, want? Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Like much of the 'elevated horror' in which cutting-edge distributor A24 specializes, 'Bring Her Back' doesn't bother to answer all your questions, even when that might result in a stronger movie. In a sense, it doesn't have to when it can trot out reliable new tropes of the genre: basso profundo rumbles and whispers on the soundtrack, visual games with focal planes to keep the audience off balance, and supporting actors cast for maximum unsettling presence (Milly Shapiro as the little sister in Ari Aster's 'Hereditary' being the textbook example). The Philippous have a lulu of the latter in young Jonah Wren Phillips as Oliver, another of Laura's foster children and a figure of pure visual dread. Wide-eyed and seemingly possessed by a demonic wraith, Oliver is a silent, staring somnambulist, and all he has to do is appear in a corner of the frame to give an audience the willies. And that's before he starts going at himself with a kitchen knife. 'Bring Her Back' is not the kind of horror movie that promises grue and doesn't deliver, and when the carnage comes, it is fulsome, fleshy and wet. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. As the endangered siblings, Wong is artlessly sympathetic and Barratt pulls you to his side as a protective older brother no one believes is up to any good. 'Bring Her Back' keeps piling the traumas onto poor Andy past the point where they make much sense, though, and the Philippous are clearly still young enough to think modulation and moderation are for weenies. Given the likely success of this movie, there's no reason the directors need to think otherwise, and, anyway, they've got Hawkins having a happy horror holiday and little Jonah Phillips burning a hole in the screen. That's enough for now, but God help us when they grow up a bit. – – – Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at – – – Three stars. Rated R. At theatres. Contains strong, disturbing, bloody violent content; some grisly images; graphic nudity; underage drinking; and language. 104 minutes. Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time. Ontario Toronto & GTA Toronto & GTA Canada Sunshine Girls
The Independent
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Mike Leigh's Bafta-nominated Hard Truths will make you laugh and cry
There are Pansy Deacons all over the place. She's the focus of Mike Leigh's Hard Truths – a vessel of formless rage played by Bafta nominee Marianne Jean-Baptiste. When a furniture store employee dares to ask her if she needs help, she immediately snaps back with 'Are you threatening me?' and demands to speak to the manager. She picks fights with customers behind her in the checkout queue, with her dentist, with other drivers – with anyone, really, who dares enter her orbit. She complains about charity workers (too cheery), dogs in coats (arrogant), and well-dressed babies ('What's a baby got pockets for? What's it going to keep in its pocket, a knife?'). We're used to this kind of everyday spectacle. The public display of nonconformism. Erratic behaviour. Eccentric garb. Sudden outbursts. We watch these strangers with crooked smiles, betraying some combination of fear, bemusement, and sympathy. Or perhaps, instead, we stare down at the floor and try to disappear them from our minds. These, though, are exactly the sort of people Leigh has always shown an interest in: be it the curdled, isolated masculinity of David Thewlis's Johnny Fletcher in Naked (1993), or the boundless cheer of Sally Hawkins's Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky (2008). And when we talk about realism in Leigh's work, about his particular methodology of using extensive rehearsals to develop his scripts in tandem with his casts, it's ultimately about interrogating that spectacle. In the small and gradual reveal of her life – scene by scene, mundane incident by mundane incident – we start to see Pansy's rage as sorrow. It's a symptom of life history, social circumstances, and, inevitably, a sprinkle of late-stage capitalistic ennui. Pansy's anger is so outsized that, from a distance, it seems almost parodic. Leigh – one of the best chroniclers of Britain, past and present – is wise enough not to stifle the instinct to laugh. In fact, Pansy has some pretty solid one-liners: 'Your balls are so backed up you've got sperm in your brain!' She also has health issues, chronic migraines and muscle aches – they're either the source of her stress or a symptom of it. She's wife to a nervous, uncommunicative husband (David Webber) and mother to a son (Tuwaine Barrett), implied to be autistic, that she doesn't know how to care for. There's never any quiet, never any rest. Her mother died recently. She hasn't dealt with it as well as her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin, luminous) because of the differences in their childhoods. 'I want it all to stop,' Pansy tells her, in a rare moment of clarity. Leigh, working with regular cinematographer Dick Pope, who died last October, renders small beauties out of the ordinary. We're drawn in close to Jean-Baptiste's features (the actor reunites with Leigh after her breakout in his 1996 film Secrets & Lies) – titanic in their expressiveness, twisted by an unseen poison. The actor never shaves down any of Pansy's thorns, but lets us love her despite them. Hard Truths withholds catharsis, instead choosing simply to let the shutters swing open on its protagonist's psyche for a brief interlude. After being presented with a small, perhaps meaningless gesture of kindness, Pansy's lips start to quiver, then tear open with hysterical laughter swiftly followed by angry, ancient-sounding sobs. No one in her family knows what to say. They simply let her weep. But Leigh has shown us all we need to see, the soul inside that's always been easier to ignore. Dir: Mike Leigh. Starring: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown, Jonathan Livingstone. Cert 12A, 97 mins.
