Bring Her Back

Directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, Bring Her Back follows siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) as they’re sent to live with Sally Hawkins’ Laura after their father dies. It’s exceedingly (and excessively) familiar subject matter that is, by and large, employed to hopelessly uninvolving effect by the Philippous, as the filmmakers, armed with Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman’s screenplay, deliver an often astonishingly deliberate endeavor that contains little in the way of compelling, attention-grabbing elements – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by a generic narrative, ugly, grimy cinematography, and an absence of fleshed-out characters. There is, as such, little doubt that one’s continuing efforts at finding something (anything) here to embrace fall completely and utterly flat, and while the picture admittedly does boast a small handful of agreeably disgusting interludes (eg as unpleasant an encounter with a knife as one can easily recall), Bring Her Back, which builds towards an absolutely endless third act, predominantly comes off as a pointless waste of time that somehow fares even worse than the Philippous’ disastrous first film, 2022 Talk to Me.

no stars out of ****