‘Bring Her Back’ is a visceral, unsettling horror film anchored by a compelling, fearless performance from Sally Hawkins. Set in a hauntingly desolate South Australian landscape, this is not your average supernatural thriller. It gleefully tears through genre conventions and ventures into territory that many horror films only gesture toward. With its hard 18 rating, ‘Bring Her Back’ dives deep into disturbing themes, most notably the taboo-laden pursuit of bringing back the dead – reminiscent of ‘Pet Sematary’, but darker, messier, and far less moralistic.

Hawkins plays a once-respected counsellor with decades of experience working with vulnerable children. But behind her professional veneer lies something deeply troubling. The film confronts, unflinchingly, issues of shame, abuse, and the manipulative ways such traumas can be weaponised. It asks: when someone carries a complicated and shameful past, who will believe them if they try to rewrite their own narrative?

There are echoes of films like ‘Jennifer Eight’ and ‘Blink’, where visual impairment becomes a key thematic device. In ‘Bring Her Back’, the blind often see more than the sighted – a paradox that plays out chillingly through Andy, the protagonist’s adopted older son. While he begins as the protective older brother, his role is gradually reversed. He becomes both suspect and victim, manipulated and ultimately mutilated, in a world that seems better suited to the blind than the seeing.

Hawkins’ character adopts half-siblings whose lives are marked by trauma. When the older brother threatens to terminate custody of his sister, Hawkins’ character intervenes – with sinister intentions. Her true goal is to reanimate her own daughter, who drowned years earlier, and what follows is a descent into ritual, necromancy, and psychological horror.

The film does not hold back. One particularly gruesome sequence involves a character swallowing a kitchen knife and extracting their own tonsils and teeth – a scene more graphic and shocking than anything in ‘Chinatown’ where Jack Nicholson gets his nose torn. These aren’t just jump scares; they are deep, bodily violations, underscoring the film’s obsession with the boundaries between life and death.

‘Bring Her Back’ also plays with the idea of the therapist figure as a potential predator. Where therapists are usually trusted to heal, here they exploit. It’s a subversion of the archetype that adds to the film’s disquiet, and is especially jarring if your first memory of Sally Hawkins is in ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’, where she played a chipper, ever-smiling schoolteacher. That same character, transposed into a horror universe, becomes deeply unnerving.

The film is full of haunting details: Hawkins’ character cutting a lock of hair from the corpse of her new ward’s father at his funeral, and ritualistic symbols around the house that seem designed not to keep evil out, but to trap it within. There’s also the eerie use of old videotapes – a classic horror trope that evokes ‘The Ring’ – and an empty swimming pool, transformed into something eerie and symbolic. The implication is that an empty pool is infinitely more disturbing than one filled with water.

Tonally, the film shares DNA with Ari Aster’s work such as ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Midsommar’. Like Aster, the director here crafts a slow-burning psychological horror, where grief, trauma, and supernatural dread intersect. The characters seem to exist in a liminal space – trapped between life and death, sanity and madness. It’s no coincidence that Hawkins starred in ‘The Shape of Water’, because water plays a crucial symbolic role here, acting as a conduit between realms.

Narratively, ‘Bring Her Back’ is fragmented and nonlinear, but this only enhances its psychological unease. The film moves like a fever dream, disorienting and oppressive, and its atmosphere lingers long after the credits roll.