Major spoilers ahead for Bring Her Back
Danny and Michael Philippou have yet again created an absolutely terrifying horror movie with their latest film Bring Her Back. Distributed by A24 in late May, Bring Her Back revolves around a pair of siblings, Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), who are adopted by foster mother Laura (Sally Hawkins) after their father dies in a gruesome fashion.
Not long after Piper and Andy begin living with Laura, they begin noticing strange behavior from her. She takes an immediate liking to Piper, but less so to Andy, to the point she begins psychologically tormenting him by making him think he's wetting the bed and other things to exacerbate the trauma he's experiencing from his dad's death.
The movie soon reveals that Andy is struggling to cope because his dad was abusive to him throughout his childhood and continued abusing him even after he married Piper's mother. All of this complicates a movie that revels in dark family drama. Let's dive into its many mysteries.
What did Andy do when he was a kid?
Early in the film, the care worker assigned to Piper and Andy's case, Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton), alludes to Andy having a troubled past. We later learn that when he was eight-years-old, Andy struck Piper. He had grown angry and frustrated at the fact his father would beat him, but never laid a hand on Piper, seemingly loving her in a way he never did his biological son. Laura later uses this against Andy by hitting Piper herself and then making Andy look like the perpetrator.
Andy probably suffers almost more than anyone in this film (except Connor/Ollie) because of his horrific childhood and Laura's treatment of him. All he wants to do now is protect his sister, who is mostly blind. They plan to move into a house together when he turns 18 and can apply to be her guardian.
And while what Andy did as a kid was awful, he is deeply apologetic about his actions and now goes above and beyond to care for Piper. They even establish a code word, "grapefruit," that comes up a few times throughout the film that they use to asses whether the other is being wholly truthful.
The dark truth of the occult ritual
What's the deal with the ritual Laura intends to perform? Laura never got over the death of her daughter, Cathy, and has spent a significant amount of time studying a strange occult ritual that will allow her to, supposedly, bring her daughter back to life.
But rituals like the one featured in this film are incredibly violent and disturbing. As shown via old videotapes that Laura studies to figure out what she needs to do, the ritual involves finding a host body for the deceased's soul. In this case, that's Piper. Laura intends to drown Piper in the pool in the same place where Cathy died.
To transplant Cathy's soul from one body to another, Laura has kept Cathy's corpse frozen in a freezer. At some point before the movie starts, Laura kidnaps a boy named Connor Bird, who she calls Oliver, or "Ollie" for short. She claims Ollie is a selective mute, but in reality Laura has allowed him to become possessed by something demonic. Ollie is meant to consume Cathy's body and then "purge" her soul back into Piper's corpse, therefore reviving Cathy's soul inside of Piper.
Since it is a ritual, there are certain steps that have to occur, which is why Laura keeps Ollie locked away as his hunger increases. It's also so he cannot escape, since the entire ritual takes place inside a white circle. The one time Andy takes Ollie over the circle, he starts seizing, as if trying to get the demon out of him, suggesting that the ritual cannot happen outside of that white line.
What happens to all of the characters at the end of the movie?
By the end of the movie, Andy has figured out something is seriously wrong with Laura. He returns to Wendy and notices a missing poster on the wall showing Connor. Realizing that "Ollie" had written "Bird," his surname, on a piece of paper and recognizing his face, Andy understands that Laura has kidnapped Connor.
He eventually convinces Wendy to return to Laura's house with him to investigate. Laura almost succeeds in preventing Wendy from learning the truth, but then Wendy sees blood on Laura's arm from where she'd gotten into a skirmish with Ollie. Desperate to fulfill her ritual, Laura drives her car into Andy and Wendy, killing Wendy instantly and then drowning Andy in the puddle where he lands.
Later, she attempts to complete the ritual by letting "Ollie" eat Cathy's body and then attempting to drown Piper. But Piper puts up a fight and even calls Laura "mom" at one point, causing Laura to realize she cannot let herself go through with it.
Piper escapes and is shown getting picked up by a passerby and taken to safety. The last time we see her she is shown listening to her brother's final voice message to her and looking at the lights of a plane flying overhead, recalling the time earlier in the film when Andy told her that the overhead plane meant their dad's soul was going to heaven. It speaks even more to Andy's character that he would tell Piper his dad was going to heaven, considering the horrors that his father inflicted upon him.
In the end, Ollie manages to escape from Laura by crossing over the white line. When the police finally show up, he's able to tell them his real name. Meanwhile, Laura retrieves Cathy's remains and takes them into the pool with her. Using the spot on her arm where Ollie had bitten her, Laura digs further into the wound so she'll bleed out and die slowly in the pool while cradling her dead daughter.
Bring Her Back is now playing in theaters.