They found their dad in the bathroom: naked and bloody after falling out of the shower, vomit spattering his face and chest.
For 17-year-old Andy, it was a horrible and almost surreal moment. It froze him in place. His disabled stepsister, Piper, however, leapt into action. She couldn’t see her stepfather, because she’s mostly blind. But she didn’t hesitate to reach for him to give him mouth-to-mouth and CPR.
But the man was quite dead by then.
When Andy closes his eyes at night, he still sees flashes of that terrible moment. He wasn’t really close to his dad. But his death plagues him. Andy can’t even take a shower himself at this juncture. He just splashes himself in the sink or uses a hose in the backyard to clean up.
Frankly, though, all of that is a struggle from the past. And Andy has more than enough to wrestle with in the present.
He very much wants to care for Piper. I mean, he’s been looking after her, protecting her from bullies, for a long time now. But he’s not quite 18. So, instead he and Piper are now living with a foster parent named Laura.
Laura had a blind daughter of her own who drowned some time ago. And she sees Piper as a godsend. She sees Andy … well, she clearly would be happier if she didn’t see Andy at all.
Laura seems harmless enough on the surface, just a woman filling the void in her life by caring for foster children. She also cares for an odd boy named Oliver, who doesn’t speak and stares blankly into the distance.
But for all of those niceties, there’s something off kilter here. Laura is obsessive and strange. She keeps Oliver either locked away or lets him wander around mutely, dressed in next to nothing, in the back yard.
On top of that, Piper keeps getting injured in small ways. She awoke one morning with a black eye, and Laura instantly blamed it on Andy. For that matter, Laura had weird things to say at Dad’s funeral about left-behind spirits. She forced Andy to kiss his dad goodbye as the body lay there in the open casket. Laura even wanted him to kiss the corpse on the lips, which was a step too far for him.
Yes, there are some very disconcerting red flags waving around this woman. Especially since Laura is working so hard to snuggle up with his stepsister and get the tween girl to call her “Mommy.”
Andy just hopes he can keep Piper, and well, himself safe and sound until he comes of age.
[Note: Spoilers are contained in the following sections.]
Andy cares deeply about his stepsister, Piper. He admits that when his dad married Piper’s mom, he was jealous at first. His dad finally acted as if he “found the family he wanted,” Andy notes. But the boy’s attitude quickly changed. And he tells Piper of his loving concern for her.
In fact, he’s as loving and caring as a brother can be. He hangs around under Laura’s questionable care, mostly for his sister’s sake. Piper adores her brother in return. And when she notices something strange in the foster household, her first concerns are for him.
It’s also obvious that Laura loved her daughter, Cathy. (But the girl’s death broke Laura in horrible ways.)
Laura has VHS tapes of a recorded ritual; it depicts a demonic rite that transfers the “spirit” of the dead into another person’s body. (More on that in Violent Content.) In that vein, she talks to Andy about her belief that our spirit remains in the body long after we die. It’s eventually revealed that Oliver and Piper are part of Laura’s grisly plan to supernaturally “recreate” her daughter, Cathy.
Laura uses blood and magic circles (one such circle surrounds her entire property) to supernaturally control the zombified Oliver. And if the boy gets pulled outside the circle, he writhes and screams in pain.
An open-casket funereal takes place in a local church. After their father’s death, Andy tries to sooth Piper’s grief by talking about Dad’s spirit being taken to heaven on a plane. Laura feeds Oliver a clipping of Andy’s dad’s hair in a supernatural rite. Andy has spiritual premonitions about Piper dying.
When Andy and Piper find their deceased dad, the man is lying naked on his back, displaying full-frontal nudity. (The camera jumps back to that revealing scene in several flashbacks.)
Early on we’re shown clips and images from a VHS recording that show a nearly naked man grabbing a bound-and-kneeling teen girl by the throat. Then we see two men pulling the struggling girl up by a rope around her neck. Later we’re shown other scenes from that video that show a zombie-like, bloody-eyed individual gnawing fiercely on a corpse’s face and body and then vomiting his stomachs content into the face and open mouth of someone else.
Eventually we realize that all these viciously violent clips depict a resurrection ritual of sorts that’s designed to bring someone back from the dead. Accordingly, Laura leads Oliver to a freezer where he begins to devour Cathy’s frozen corpse. We see him walk about shirtless with a distended abdomen. He then vomits the gore he’s consumed. Oliver also smashes a glass window, ripping open massive wounds on his arms and hands. He crushes a fly and eats it.
Early on, Andy takes pity on the seemingly dazed Oliver. He offers him a piece of melon on the tip of a knife. The boy grabs the knife and chews it viciously: the camera watching closely as the large blade slices through his lips and gums, ripping out teeth. Oliver later tries to eat a wooden tabletop, again breaking teeth in a gory mess. Oliver also tears strips of flesh off his own arm and eats it.
When Andy and Piper find their dead dad, his face and mouth are bloodied from his apparent fall out of the shower. We see a young girl drowning in a pool. Someone knocks herself out cold when she accidentally runs into a post.
Andy falls and slams his head on the floor. He’s taken to the hospital with a concussion. He’s also hit by a car, leaving him incapacitated and writhing on the ground with broken limbs. A woman next to him is crushed and killed. We see her bloodied corpse.
We learn that Andy’s dad used to physically abuse him. Laura is attacked and has large chunks of flesh ripped off her arm. We see mauled animals in Laura’s backyard. Someone drowns, face first, in a puddle of water. A bloody corpse leaves smears of gore as it’s dragged across a kitchen floor. Laura attempts to drown a struggling victim in a backyard pool.
Some 20 f-words pepper the dialogue along with uses of “h—” and a misuse of Jesus’ name.
Laura slips some sort of medication into Andy’s food to keep him unconscious at night.
In a wake-like “celebration,” Laura allows Andy and Piper to drink shots of liquor. All three of them get roaringly drunk. Piper stumbles about singing and then passes out from the drink.
While at school, Piper makes overtures of friendship to a trio of girls her age. But they rudely mock and giggle about her obvious disability. When Andy and Piper move into Laura’s house, Andy is given a bed in a cluttered storage closet.
Laura takes Andy’s phone several times and uses his sleeping face (he’s drugged) to open it and read his texts and messages. She draws a pitcher full of warm water and pours it on his crotch at night to make him believe he’s wetting himself. And she physically attacks Piper in her sleep and then accuses Andy, even wearing his body spray to make Piper believe he’s the abuser.
Andy finds a missing persons poster that proves that a boy was abducted and horribly abused.
I’ve seen and reviewed supernatural atrocity pics, jump-scare horror fare, grisly slashers, and foul thrillers of every stripe. But Bring Her Back is frankly one of the more unsettling films that I’ve had to sit through.
A big reason for that is the fact that the film’s directors, brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, have crafted something that feels tangibly real.
Yes, there’s a creepy supernatural side to the movie, focused on hellish, gore-vomiting horrors and cannibalistic rituals that are gruesome to the extreme.
But the lion’s share of the film leaves viewers simmering in a realistic pool of dread, profanity and grief-fueled anguish. In a way, that’s even more disquieting than the goop. And then when you weave in the film’s visceral brutalities, unleashed primarily on teens and children, it all adds up to a very disturbing moviegoing experience.
Now, perhaps some extreme horror aficionados may actually want to put themselves through that kind of misery. The moviemakers obviously believe there are plenty of those fans out there.
I, however, wouldn’t recommend it.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
