Monday Mystery Movie: Bring Her Back
'Feel bad movie of the year' is code for 'death knell of a genre.'
Bring Her back, described by the filmmakers in the pre-show introduction as “a visually impaired girl is adopted by a family of satanists” (paraphrased), is, generously, another sleek, grisly contemporary horror with elevated creepiness and genuine trauma. Which, for anyone like me, who enjoys story, even novelty alongside their gore and scares, is really just code for ‘tedious.’
It’s a grown cliche that ‘all horror movies are about trauma.’ A cliche that I only find helpful when dismissing those trends that are most distasteful in contemporary genre pictures; the phrase gets close to suggesting the power of Dracula, or Night of the Living Dead, or Halloween. Classic films that first scare us, and then, upon encountering our subconscious, awaken us to broader, more grounded fears. The contemporary trend is to “elevate,” to make theme and subtext more integral to the horror itself. Perhaps it begins with Darren Aronovsky, whose psychological dramas veer into shocking territory, starting with Requiem for a Dream, all the way to Mother, which most closely takes a genre form—home invasion meets religious horror. And yet through all the effects and shock he, Aronovsky, intended that we always, always understood that he was “saying something.”
The trend has reached its apex (or nadir) with Ari Aster, whose successive Hereditary and Midsommer relied entirely on hard-hitting family trauma to introduce the creepiness, and shock factor. In these films the old adage morphs into ‘trauma is the horror.’ But is it? Trauma is traumatic. Horror is horrifying. Horror movies scare us through the suggestion of something horrible: vampires, zombies, demonic cults, the apocalypse. The line between a psychological drama with traumatic secrets and a horror movie with realistic settings is perhaps so fine in our day that we’ve lost track of aesthetic distinctions.
Bring Her Back is a film with loss at its center. Eerily similar to Ari Aster’s formula, the children, Piper, visually impaired, and her protective older brother Andy, lose their father early on. They are haphazardly sent through the “system” (the Australian version of CPS, another thinly suggested “critique,” so we know the filmmakers are aware of the world) and wind up living with Laura, a quirky and wired Sally Hawkins. She’s also dealing with loss, the loss of her own daughter, Cathy, who was also visually impaired. Laura shows herself to be more interested in Piper than Andy, and Sally Hawkins is great as a visibly creepier rendition of her usual character, so we know right off that her intentions are twisted. And then, here it comes, a creepy little boy appears. Oliver, he’s a stereotypically creepy horror-movie-kid, drugged out with dead eyes, mute, possibly psychopathic. We find him first seemingly torturing the cat in the triangular swimming pool, drained. We see it from above, a recognizable drone shot featuring the supposedly ‘creepy’ geometry of a triangle within a circle. The harsh angle of the pool carved out within an acre-wide chalk circle drawn around the property. Uh-oh. The significance of establishing shots is reminiscent of the vapid terseness of Aster, the clean frame of the doll-tree house in Hereditary, the A-frame sex-lodges of the cult in Midsommer, meant to imply something insidious beneath the surface. And aesthetically, Bring her Back falls into a familiar pattern. Music cues, jagged jumps in tone, constant rumbling and screeching, these are the things that make it a horror movie, presumably. But the story is constantly losing momentum, relying on the next vibe shift to string us along. The overall aesthetic mission of Bring her Back is to collect as many elements that the average viewer will find disturbing, whether that be psychotic demon children, nails on a chalkboard, crooked camera angles, or, eventually, body gore.
Hawkins’ Laura slowly pushes herself further and further. The creepiest, most effective horror material is actually a sadistic, satanist home movie she plays and replays on the VCR. A sort of “how-to” regarding demon management. Demonology for dummies. The clips show a traditionally freaky basement covered in white chalk circles. Voices speak russian from the shadows, behind the camera. And before the camera, bodies twist and gnash, in various states of consumtion, themselves and each other. The VHS quality and imported, black-market vibe makes it feel like a snuff film of reverse exorcisms. And it’s truly blood curdling. But this is the horror film within the film, the impetus for Sally Hawkins’ character to pursue the dark arts in an attempt to reconnect with her daughter. Similar to the impetus that drove her to stuff her deceased Pomeranian, who greets Piper and Andy when they first come to the house.
Laura’s behavior grows stranger. She pressures Andy to kiss his father on the lips at the wake, and then kisses his father herself. She throws the kids a drunken rager, despite them being, likely, 17 and 12. And she comforts Andy as a therapist and then manipulates and infantilizes him, trying to drive the siblings apart. This creepiness, this evil, is affecting. Because it’s child abuse. These kids have suffered one of the worst things imaginable, entered the foster care system, and then found themselves in hell. Of course it’s frightening, disturbing, but it’s only narratively effective, I’d argue, if something comes out of it other than trauma. And, spoiler alert, all that comes of it is trauma.
The hellishness ramps up slowly but steadily, through dips and rises in creepiness, episodes cobbled together almost as if they are brief episodes in a streaming show. Oliver, the demon-child under Laura’s control is hungry, and on the prowl, and it soon becomes apparent that he’s a victim as much as he’s a monster. So everybody in the film is trauma wrought. Whose story is it?
The gore, once we get there, is graphic, close-up, and stomach twisting, but also largely ceremonial. Or, feels that way. There’s no discernable rhyme or reason to the satanic circle drawing and hair-snipping that Laura gets up to, and though the climactic violence of the film’s waning has been telegraphed, the grisly gorging of the demon isn’t itself derived from cause and effect. Perhaps this is demon-logic, but I find myself hoping for the film to have machinations of its own, an internal logic, and hope in vain. We arrive at the promised satanism and though it pulls squeals and groans from the audience it still fails to deliver. Unlike the masterful examples of gore and ghoulish evil—The Exorcist, or The Shining, or even the latest Evil Dead installment—there’s nothing building beneath it all, no musical crescendo to the grinding horror. The plot is drawn out like a square wave, like a fingernail stuttering acrossed a chalkboard.
Finally, Bring Her Back arrives at the ending, its most grievous phase. Because in the end, the film is indeed cynical, leaving us with trauma, even more traumatized characters, and not much else. There was a point near the end of Piper’s ordeal which nearly tipped me over the edge. I simply couldn’t see the value in putting this poor girl through so much literal hellishness, without an ounce of catharsis. No need to cite Aristotle’s Poetics, I think it should be obvious why this might be upsetting. No bloody end for the twisted villains (in fact, gratitude, empathy), no agency for the burdened heroes—is this truly the state of modern horror? Or is this something else, postmodern horror? Post-irony? Full throated cynicism? Why not have everybody die an agonizing death? Why not have an asteroid strike full force into the Southern hemisphere while we’re at it?
Surely this will work on some people. Those attuned to the en vogue Neon/A24 elevated trauma-dump horror that keeps hitting theaters. But I suspect that even those people will be missing something. They’ll be curled up under their covers, with sappy streetlight curling its fingers under their blinds, warm and safe and comfortably frightened, but also feeling bad, something weaseling around a space in their brain reserved for existential dread, not just a healthy fear of the boogie-man, but fear itself; a fear of living, a fear of life. I don’t think that’s very cathartic, nor very fun. I think that Bring Her Back is another dire note for the state of contemporary horror.