Bring Her Back (2025)

It’s such a surreal experience to have this movie come out. It’s a wild thing when a movie idea comes into your head, and it just won’t leave until you make it. “Talk to Me” was sort of like a party movie, but this time we wanted to do a character study and something that was a slow boil, and something more psychological. So this film has different tones and tempos. Plus, Sally Hawkins is just absolutely terrifying in this movie. I feel like she embodied this dark character so perfectly, and you could even see her in-character between shoots, which was wild.

“Bring Her Back” is the darkest project we’ve worked on so far, it’s a bit more grim than our previous film. We wrote “Bring Her Back” at the same time as “Talk to Me” as a way to process a series of tragedies we had in our family, because it felt like the only way to get these feelings out. It was also heavily inspired by old Psycho Biddy films like “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.” I really love Bette Davis, and the way she was this crazy character actress who really sank her teeth into her roles. We really owe this movie to our young cast, Billy Barratt, Jonah Wren Phillips, and Sora Wong, who had never acted before. We watched them evolve as actors during this movie and that was such a great experience.

A haunting and harrowing exploration of grief, Bring Her Back is one of the best horror/dramas in decades. The Australian film stars Sally Hawkins as a grieving mother who has taken in two recent orphans. The tight direction and amazing acting steadily flesh out a story about the lengths people will go to overcome death, with Hawkins' Laura crossing serious moral lines without ever losing her humanity. The scares are effective, but the emotional core of Bring Her Back is the real highlight of the film.

Deranged, unhinged, broken, wounded, angry, scared, sadistic, and incredibly dangerous. Somehow, Sally Hawkins creates a character that’s all these things, becoming one of the most insidious villains in horror history. And yet, you can’t help but see her pain and trauma beneath it all. Bring Her Back is *not* an easy movie to watch. It’s deeply unsettling and unnerving. But if you’re a fan of horror and suspense like me, you know that means the filmmakers did a good job. Anytime a movie can get under your skin the way Bring Her Back does, it’s an achievement in storytelling and cinema.