“Bring Her Back” (2025) is nauseating, devastating, and excruciating all in one breath, and yet its final moments are so poignant that they might get you all teary-eyed for someone you were actively rooting against. The ending offers some grace to Laura as she seemingly reunites with her late daughter. Although wickedly cathartic, it’s not remotely soothing to see them together. Instead, it’s brutal, and so is the film, which shows just how paralyzing and all-encompassing grief can be. That brings Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, the Australian filmmaking duo behind 2022’s “Talk To Me,” with another deep dive into the nature of grief.
Their sophomore feature, backed by A24, also shows its characters trying to navigate how to process a loss, but it doesn’t offer them any peace. It puts them in a constant state of misery, making their desperation to escape even more palpable and the gore even more painful. In this stomach-curdling mash-up of supernatural horror and body horror, we get to witness a heartbreaking story of a woman hoping to be with her late daughter, and a teenager trying to shed any sign of his tragic past with his deceased father. The script uses their interpersonal friction for a visceral breakdown of their deteriorating mental health.
Yet, even as they fight for Piper’s guardianship, they can’t rid themselves of their unresolved traumas. So, the film lures you into its torturous spectacle, but only to get you uncomfortably closer to its characters that would make you look away, not just from the squirmish details, but from their dreadful reality. Let’s see how this notion plays out across the film.
Spoilers ahead
Bring Her Back (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
The A24 horror film follows an orphaned brother and sister who enter the isolated home of their foster mother only to learn the dark secrets she has been hiding from the authorities for many years.
What happens to ‘Bring Her Back’?
The film begins with ghastly footage of an occult ritual where someone is being choked to death. It doesn’t reveal any specific details. Suddenly, it shows us a comforting urban space and introduces us to its central pair of siblings, Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger step-sister, Piper (Sora Wong). As an older brother, Andy seems highly protective of Piper. He rescues her from an awkward interaction with a group of her schoolmates. At the time, she was only trying to have a small talk with them, but they started mocking her for her condition. Still, Andy doesn’t let her get a hint of their hurtful words. Back home, we get a glimpse of another side of him.
Andy finds his father lying lifelessly in the bathroom as the shower keeps running. Instead of helping him, he freezes. So, it falls upon Piper to help the old man. She tries to breathe life into him, but to no avail. The father dies, leaving his kids in charge of each other. Andy, who is about to be 18 in a few months, decides to move into a foster home with Piper. Once he turns eighteen, he can claim her legal guardianship. With that thought, the two show up at their foster mother, Laura’s (Sally Hawkins) house. She seems warm and inviting, although mildly hostile toward Andy. It feels like an ideal environment for Piper, until it doesn’t.
Why does Laura torture Andy?
After stepping into his foster home, Andy meets Laura’s foster son Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), seemingly choking a cat in a swimming pool. Andy finds that strange and shocking, but doesn’t confront Laura, since he is just a 17-year-old with very little choice about his life. He tries to make peace with reality for the time being and move out with Piper when the time comes. However, it doesn’t take long for him to suspect Laura is up to no good with any of her foster kids. She joins him and Piper at their father’s funeral and forces him to kiss his father on the lips, claiming the soul lingers in a body for a while after one’s death.
Back home, she allows Piper to have some alcohol. While drunk, Andy loses his inhibitions and opens up about his domestic abuse. His father abused him, but deeply cared for Piper, which got him worked up against her as a kid. However, he regrets those choices. Now, he is genuinely concerned about her well-being. Laura patiently listens to him and learns about his traumatic past, only to use those details against him, for her benefit. She goes to great lengths to torture him. She pees in a cup and pours that piss over his pants, making him think that he peed himself while asleep. Later, she beats Piper in her eye and accuses him of beating her instead.
That happens after Andy returns from the hospital. He was there to recover from an accident in the shower, triggered by an apparition of his late father, warning him not to let Piper go out in the rain. While in the hospital, Laura momentarily claims that she killed his father. Laura does everything to disorient him and make him deem unfit to be Piper’s guardian. That’s because she wants to be Piper’s sole guardian to use her body to resurrect her late daughter, Cathy (Mischa Heywood). Laura makes Piper think that Andy is abusive and unreliable, hoping it will bring them closer. However, by then, Andy picks up on clues about Laura’s schemes and seeks help from the authorities.
More On This: Bring Her Back (2025) Movie Review
Bring Her Back (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Does Andy expose Laura’s lies?
Andy meets Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton), his and Piper’s social worker, to warn her about Laura’s sick behavior. While there, he realizes that Oliver is actually Connor Bird, a young boy who has been missing for a while. Andy recounts Oliver’s psychotic behaviour — how he started eating the knife that was meant to cut a cantaloupe. At the time, Andy couldn’t calm him down. Luckily, Laura swooped in at the last minute and locked Oliver inside a room, and started playing loud music to hide the sounds from the occult ritual VHS tapes. It made Andy realize Laura’s murky motives. He connects her behaviour to his father’s, who concealed his abusive behaviour from Piper, making her feel like he is the nicest person alive.
Based on these observations, Andy tells Wendy about Laura and Oliver and urges her to see this in person. While on their way there, Andy calls Piper to open up about their father’s abuse and apologizes for hurting her as a child. He says that they must leave Laura’s custody. Laura intercepts this message and starts cleaning the mess Oliver had made around the house before Wendy shows up. She had already left Piper at a goalball practice session as soon as Andy ran out of the house. So, with a clean house, she pretends that everything is fine, making Wendy also lose trust in Andy. That works for the most part until it’s time for Wendy to leave. She realizes that Laura is bleeding and asks her what’s happening. Laura panics, worried about getting exposed.
Does Piper escape Laura’s custody?
Laura tries to stop Wendy from leaving, urging her to help in bringing back her daughter. Wendy briefly escapes to find Oliver / Connor eating the flesh of a frozen, dead body. She rushes to her car with Andy, only to get crushed to death by Laura’s car. Barely alive, Andy also loses his life as Laura drowns him in a rain puddle. Soon, Laura drives Piper back home, but doesn’t reveal what she did to Andy. It doesn’t take long for Piper to figure out the truth. She hears Andy’s voice and walks there, but finds Oliver instead. She touches Oliver’s heavily bruised scalp and gets immediately spooked. Soon, she walks into the bathroom to find Andy’s dead body.
Laura uses her keys to walk in. She drags Piper out to the swimming pool, believing Piper died after a fatal fall. She tries to drown Piper in the pool water for a resurrection. However, Piper’s instincts kick in at the right moment. She escapes after calling Laura, her ‘mom.’ Laura suddenly loses her grip over Piper, thinking her daughter is finally back, while in fact, Piper says it to misdirect her. Piper tries to escape the property but gets into a fight with Oliver. She falls from a height and gets hurt. Yet, she makes her way to the main road and stops a car for help.
Soon, the police arrive there to find Oliver/Connor in the woods. In the final moments of the film, the cops find Laura floating over the pool holding on to her late daughter’s body. In the end, Piper escapes Laura’s custody, but loses her older brother along the way. The film doesn’t reveal what exactly happens to Piper after it all.
What is the occult ritual in Bring Her Back?
In the film, Laura tries to bring back her daughter by using Oliver and Piper for an occult ritual. The script implies that Oliver is possessed by a horrifying demon, which leads him to act erratically and lose all his usual senses. Oliver / Connor is supposed to act as a host, and Piper as a vessel to resurrect Cathy’s soul. That’s why Oliver devours Cathy’s flesh so he can regurgitate the corpse. It will lead her soul into Piper’s dead body. The VHS tapes that Laura sees in her room help her keep Oliver under the influence. Their instructions also allow her to make Andy believe he saw an apparition of his father when it was likely Oliver, who is fed a strand of hair from Andy’s late father. It’s also how Oliver speaks in Andy’s voice when Piper returns from her goalball practice.
Why does Laura try to drown Piper in the pool?
Laura tries to kill Piper as part of her occult ritual. It says that the person, acting as a vessel, must be killed in the same way as the dead person died. That’s why Laura tries to drown Piper in the pool so she can reunite with Cathy. If you’re wondering why Laura sees Piper as the perfect vessel, it’s because she finds her closer to her daughter. Cathy was blind and died by drowning in the pool. Piper is visually impaired and reminds Laura of Cathy. It leads her to take the cruel step.
What does the final shot of Bring Her Back mean?
In the final moments of “Bring Her Back,” we see Laura embracing her late daughter’s corpse while floating over the swimming pool. In isolation, without prior knowledge of her past, this shot would seem ghastly and extreme. However, with everything we learn about her, it becomes profoundly melancholic. It shows Laura finally at peace with her daughter as she loses her fixation on bringing her back. However, it can also be interpreted as a sign of her doomed fate — a final nail in the coffin. In this bittersweet moment of irony, she seemingly reunites with her daughter by losing a part of herself and by learning to let go.
Bring Her Back (2025) Movie Themes Analyzed
Trauma, Grief, and Abuse
The Philippou brothers’ film uses a blend of supernatural and body horror elements, but that’s only to flesh out its characters. It utilizes its gore and shock value to address Laura and Andy’s deep-seated trauma of losing their loved ones. The style and substance go hand in hand in the film to show how grief creeps up on people when they least expect it. Much of Andy and Laura’s turmoil is due to their inability to let go of their past. Andy at least wants to escape the cycle of abuse by not being an enabler like his father. However, Laura uses emotional and physical abuse to get what she wants. It also goes on to show how grief can lead even someone as sane and courteous as her to go to extreme lengths.
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