9. Bring Her Back, dir. Danny & Michael Philippou
Friendship was the most upsetting movie of 2025. But Bring Her Back has a good case for runner-up. And this time our movie is upsetting in the usual way bring about awful things happening to innocent, helpless people.
I sometimes forget how much of a horror pervert I am. I showed The Substance to some friends in 2025 and didn't realize that some people do not see the beauty in the glorification of body horror. A regular non-depraved person might just be disgusted by the disgusting. However, even I have limits, and Bring Her Back is getting close to too much for me. We're on the border of Lars von Trier levels of extreme unpleasantness with this one. Once you go beyond von Trier to French New Extreme, then you're out in spaces I do not want to travel. The Philippou twins hit the horror scene hard with their first movie Talk to Me, and Bring Her Back is doubling down on that movie's most intense elements. Their two movies are all about teenagers slamming hard into the occult, and nobody is safe, no matter how small.
There's a good bet that the third Philippou movie will not make my Top 15 if they keeps going this way.
A trend I've gotten really annoyed with in horror movies in 2025 was how many of them were set in Airbnbs. Nobody seems to live anywhere in horror movies anymore. There's no sense of character or place. Companion or Death of a Unicorn or even Keeper (most of whom are movies I liked) are not about their spaces. The space they're set in only exists to be far away from civilization. They're generically Not-Here, or put it another way, Nowhere. These are not the Overlook Hotel, they're cheap places to film and maybe an excuse for a bad cell signal in your script. Bring Her Back is set in a Somewhere - an unpleasant Somewhere certainly. Yet still a place with an identity, maybe even more so than the house from No Other Choice. This house is off-kilter, everything is an angle, with a long history of what appear to be additions. It is no longer its architect's original vision, it is some fusion of several different ideas into a mess of concepts. This is not just a house to be a house, it is a document of a person's life, an accumulation of things and rubbish and details, such as the wall of dusty knick-knacks or the unfashionable carpets or the beaded curtains or the taxidermy dog. Our home owner, Laura (Sally Hawkins) puts on a brave face of normality. But the house gestures at questions she does not want to answer. What is going on with that filthy empty pool in the backyard?
Another clue might be her foster child, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who has an unmentioned "something" happening to him. It is the kind of thing you avoid of politeness, yet can never possibly not notice. He never speaks. His head is growing larger and larger. His eyes are changing colors. And what is he doing with that knife -oh my pancake-flipping Christ, that was a fucking lot! Oh my God, that was extreme, movie. Fuck me.
Bring Her Back starts very badly for its two leads. Those are siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong). They're coming into this house with a great deal of baggage and pain with an abusive father who dies in a sudden graphic way right at the start of this movie. (Don't be surprised when things stay at this register of bad.) Laura is an experienced state councilor so can pass appearances as a good, honest social worker. She can be, at best, your cool aunt or big sister, trendy and understanding, though at times too much like a friend than a parent. She's suffering from trauma herself, which she's open about. However, is that a path for connection or is she using her own pain to further manipulate you? It is a great performance from Hawkins. She can talk past you in a way that you'll not notice the occult spells she's drawing around her house. Bring Her Back is a movie about some kids who got a bad deal in life and are about to get a much worse one. Sometimes the world is not going to give you a chance to heal from a psychic wound. The demons can smell your injury - and they're hungry.
The real crux of cruelty comes in the third act of Bring Her Back. We get a glimmer of hope, one you know is not going to succeed. You haven't seen the demon's final form yet, the movie can't end. However, maybe one of the kids can get away, maybe Laura's undoing will start here. There is a set-up early in on in Bring Her Back, where Andy lightly crashes his car and his side view mirror falls onto the ground in the driveway of the house. It is still there an hour later. If you know how movies and stories work, that's usually the narrative setting up some important tool to be used later in the film. Chekhov's side view mirror, if you will. Only Bring Her Back is not leaving some Key Item to save the day, in fact, it is more cruel if you know the tropes. Your expectations will be punished. We still have more movie to go, and things will get much worse before they even get close to getting better.
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