johnke.meBring Her Back
I enjoyed the Philippou’s previous film, Talk to Me. It was a simple premise effectively told by a bunch of genre sickos.
Their follow-up, Bring Her Back is a different beast. It’s still got plenty of the stuff that we want from a film like this - a lady learning how to summon a demon via a Russian VHS? Yes… ha ha ha… yes! - and when the film goes hard, it goes fucking hard with plenty of, uh, mouth destruction(?) with some top-class foley-work that is plenty squirm-inducing.
But this comes at a cost. I feel like the story, by virtue of being more complicated, kind of got away from them a little? At times the film is let down by some incredibly inelegant writing (e.g. Chekhov’s body-spray) with an inability to settle on a single tone they were going for and that made it less of a fun hang. It’s frustrating because the film is so close to being a lot better than it is.
But I’m begging of you, A24, can you please, please, please stop trying to make Hereditary again?
Fair play to Sally Hawkins though. Not so much playing against the Sally Hawkins type as much as weaponising the Sally Hawkins type by placing it in a more sinister context.