‘Bring Her Back,’ about sad orphans in danger, is alive with nasty, visceral thrills

I’m not sure what happened to the Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou that explains why their horror movies are swollen with grief. And I don’t need to know. What matters is how expertly, and jarringly, the Philippous show us how grief feels. In 2022’s “Talk to Me,” their breakthrough debut, and now in “Bring Her Back,” their nightmares are energetic, visceral and compelling. You want to party with them through their pain. Mourning can be manic, like here, during an unorthodox wake in which a foster mother, Laura (Sally Hawkins), pours shots of booze for her newly orphaned tween and teen charges, Piper (Sora Wong) and her older half-brother Andy (Billy Barratt).

Laura is grieving too. Her 12-year-old daughter Cathy (Mischa Heywood) drowned in the pool out back and the script lets us know immediately that Laura intends to force Piper to be her replacement. Both girls have long, dark hair and both are — or were — visually impaired, as is Wong herself. Her Piper can see shapes and colors, which the cinematographer Aaron McLisky gets across in a brief POV snippet or two, plus perceptive shots of Piper running her fingers over countertops (and multiple corpses). But mostly, and smartly, this film lays out its terrors in plain sight. Laura is dangerous, Piper is vulnerable and Andy is the only one who can protect his sister, even though he’s just a traumatized kid who found his dead father in the shower. (Andy is still scared to bathe.)

Oh, and there’s a third child in the house: a silent boy named Oliver. Laura describes him to Piper as a boy with red, curly hair and a smile. He’s not that. He’s gruesome. It’s a hellishly impressive performance by the young actor Jonah Wren Phillips, who does things with knives and teeth and windows and cats that will haunt your brain.

The Philippous direct their films together from scripts that Danny writes with Bill Hinzman. They’re a tag team that uses the new film’s setup of two innocents trapped in a house with a violent stranger to hammer on our nervous system in two ways. There’s the gore of course, which is ghastly and precise, with scraping, peeling sound effects that you feel in your bones. Worse — yes, worse — is the way Laura manipulates the siblings’ trust. A former therapist, she presents as kooky and harmless in colorful knits that make her look like the preschool teacher of the year. She’s really a 21st-century take on a Brothers Grimm witch.

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Piper trusts her new foster mom readily. She’s been raised to think that strangers are kind, so it’s awful to watch Laura lie right to her face about what else is in the room. “It’s meat,” Laura says, urging Piper to touch something she really shouldn’t. From Piper’s perspective this is a fairly happy new-family-coming-together story until the very last minutes. From ours, it’s a primal tale of betrayal.

You might assume that Piper is the movie’s fragile victim, but she proves to be tough and salty. (In her first scene, she jokes that her brother is a pedophile.) It’s Barratt’s Andy, with his boy-band prettiness and eyes that look like he hasn’t slept in a year, who winds up taking the brunt of the torture. He’s a pretty normal kid: weight bench, acne, enough stinky hormones that Piper gifts him a can of cheap body spray. But Laura, who wants Piper all to herself, needs to push Andy out of the picture — she literally stands in front of him in photographs — so she attacks him with every psychological weapon she’s got.

Andy can see the horrors that Piper can’t. And he’s spent his own childhood sheltering his younger sister from the truth. The rose-colored blinders she’s got on are accidentally-on-purpose his fault. “I didn’t want you to know how ugly the world is,” he explains, laying out the film’s central idea.

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The Philippous are great with young actors, perhaps because they started directing themselves and their friends for YouTube shorts when they were 13. Now 32, they’re the vanguard of a generation of self-taught filmmakers who are going to be very exciting. Shooting in your yard isn’t new — Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about what his boyhood camera did for him — but the Philippous’ ability to post videos online under the handle RackaRacka gave them instant feedback about what hooked an audience. Virality is as quantifiable as box-office dollars and they have decades of receipts.

Nothing in their professional films feels YouTube. The Philippous’ adult style is polished — and it’s worth noting that early on, they also managed to get themselves onto the set of “The Babadook,” which was shot in their hometown of Adelaide. Yet “Bring Her Back” doesn’t take the viewer’s attention for granted. It’ll play like gangbusters in a crowded theater and you should watch it there to appreciate its excellent use of surround sound. But the Philippous seem exceptionally aware of the risk that home viewers might reach for their remote. And so their creeping dread moves with momentum.

We’re always aware that Laura has a dark plan in motion. It has something to do with the opening glimpse we get of an unsettling Russian snuff video: dangling figures, distended bellies, eyes that plead for help. Whatever Laura’s up to involves circles and water and whatever’s gone wrong with Oliver — and, quite possibly, her pet dog (dead and stuffed) and cat (alive and yowling through the movie).

The Philippous have an eye for wonderful, miserable detail, like a coroner’s stretcher that gets stuck on a doorway as it goes rattling out of the house. They can say a lot in a single shot, like an image of a misfit gray pillow on a pink bed, or the way Andy adjusts his sister’s car visor so she can feel the sun on her face. Yet they like to leave things a little blurry. They make us hunt and squint to find out what’s coming, shooting scenes in shallow focus or through heavy sheets of steam and rain. Teasingly, Laura’s grand plan is all left half-explained.

The script is lean enough that there really isn’t room for narrative flubs besides one breakdown that’s a bit too convenient. Hawkins lets herself get vulnerable, too, and the film never fakes a punch by pretending she’s anything more than a small, desperate and bedraggled woman with eyes that look like a bottomless well of need. The Philippous understand loss so well that they don’t even have to explain that Laura wasn’t always a villain. A year ago, when her daughter was still alive, she was probably a lot like us. Now that’s a scary thought.