## Bring Her Back There are films where the occult machinery is the frightening bit, and then there is *Bring Her Back*, where an elaborate resurrection ritual involving a kidnapped child, a corpse in a freezer and some exceptionally unpleasant eating somehow has competition. Because the really nasty thing here is Laura. Sally Hawkins plays her with a horrible plausibility. Laura is a long-serving grief counsellor, foster carer and apparently trustworthy adult, which means that when Andy realises something is profoundly wrong, she does not need to lock him in a cellar to neutralise him. She simply makes everybody stop believing him. She separates him from Piper, engineers situations that make him appear violent and lets her professional credibility do the rest. Watching him become the unreliable person in his own entirely accurate account of events is more disturbing than a conventional monster would be. And there is plenty of conventional unpleasantness available. Ollie chewing a knife is particularly vicious because the film first encourages us to read the knife as a weapon. Then it discovers something worse for him to do with it. The later bouts of indiscriminate eating push the body horror further still, but without turning the film into a procession of gross-out set pieces. The same restraint matters with Piper. Her blindness unquestionably increases her vulnerability, yet the film avoids the obvious trick of giving us blurred point-of-view shots whenever something dreadful stands nearby. Instead, it works through how she navigates the house, what she can perceive and the gradual accumulation of details that tell her Laura is lying. It makes Piper vulnerable without making her helpless. Even the resurrection ritual is refreshingly untidy. Laura appears to be reconstructing it from a degraded VHS recording, following fragments of some older occult practice without necessarily understanding all its rules herself. That uncertainty is far more interesting than an explanatory handbook arriving in the third act. Does that make *Bring Her Back* folk horror? Perhaps only at the edges. There is inherited ritual, an enclosed environment and an old belief system intruding into contemporary life, but very little sense of the closed community we would normally expect. The label matters less than what the film does with belief: grief turns Laura into exactly the sort of person prepared to believe an appalling old ritual because ordinary reality has become unacceptable. It is brutal, deeply tense and occasionally revolting. More importantly, it understands that the most frightening person in the room is often the one everybody else thinks they can trust. --- Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast · folknhell com Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of Bring Her Back: folknhell com/bring-her-back-review along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes.

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