Pop Culture Happy Hour - Bring Her Back

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

The hit Australian horror movie Talk To Me was both very good and deeply unsettling. Now its directors (Danny and Michael Philippou) have returned with Bring Her Back, which ups the ante when it comes to disturbing, nightmarish storytelling. The film stars Sally Hawkins as a woman whose grief manifests in terrifying, ugly ways.To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

The hit Australian horror movie, Talk to Me, was both very good and deeply unsettling. Now its directors have returned with Bring Her Back, and they've upped the ante when it comes to disturbing, nightmarish storytelling. It stars Sally Hawkins as a woman whose grief manifests in terrifying and ugly ways, and depending on your tolerance for squeamishness, there's a chance you, like me, might have watched a lot of it while peering through your fingers. I'm Aisha Harris, and today we're talking about Bring Her Back on Pankhamishness. Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

Joining me today is Jordan Cruciola. She's a writer and producer and the host of the podcast Feeling Seen on Maximum Fun. Welcome back, Jordan. Thank you so much for having me. Hello. Hello. Also with us is Walter Chow. He's a writer, critic, and film instructor at the University of Colorado, Denver.

Hey, Walter, welcome back to you, too. Hey, thanks for having me. Great to have you both. I've got a crack team of horror aficionados. I am very excited. This is going to be fun. Well, in Bring Her Back, Billy Barrett and Sora Wong play step-siblings, Andy and Piper. They're orphaned after their father dies suddenly.

Andy is just a few months shy of turning 18 and wants to apply for guardianship of Piper, who is younger and has low vision. For now, though, they're sent to live with Laura, a child care worker played by Sally Hawkins. Now, Laura lives in a house deep in the woods and she's not all there. She's also looking after another orphan child, Oliver, who shows extreme signs of distress and neglect. He's played by Jonah Wren Phillips. Very quickly, their increasingly strange behavior disrupts Andy and Piper's close bond and their well-being. Bring Her Back was written and directed by twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippo. It's in theaters now.

Jordan, I'm going to start with you. What did you think? Bring her back. Obviously, talk to me was something of a sensation. And critically and financially, that movie actually outpaced hereditary. Like, that is technically a bigger hit for A-24 than Hereditary. I had a really good time. I was so impressed with what it telegraphed about what Danny and Michael Philip,

who were capable of. And bring her back, for me, exceeds talk to me. This one, I was like, this is so seriously my lane with these guys. Because you hear about movies, like, especially coming out of, like, a festival scene where like there's that hype mill around it. Oh, it was so messed up and like, you're not even going to believe this. Yeah. This movie really did make me genuinely recoil and like hug my legs to my chest in my seat

multiple times alongside being emotionally effective and devastating at turns. Super impressed, big fan of Bring Her Back. Nice, nice. Thank you, Jordan. Walter, how about you? How are you feeling about this? It is such a warm hug for me to be here with you guys. I feel like so...

The opposite of this movie. Yeah, I'm glad this movie brings about warm hugs. I feel so understood and seeing here. I love this movie. I love it, love it. I think it is a crazy kind of new masterpiece that I only maybe 50% understand and 50% just fear. And they're making stuff kind of on the vanguard, I think, of new extreme cinema, where they're just emotionally devastating and they're dealing with.

terrors and fears in ways that I've never really thought of before. I mean, talk to me, these are such old ideas, right? The possessed totem. These are old things. Except the way that they do it is so new. I think it's so seldom for me anymore. I'm this old, ugly man, and I watch a movie. I feel like, I've seen this before, you know, shaking my cane at the lack of imagination.

But when I sit in front of these people's movies, I'm like, I have no idea where this is going. I can't believe that you're breaking all of these rules and these unspoken. They're not just pushing envelopes. They're incinerating envelopes. They're like envelopes. Give me different kind of containers. They're doing things. Give me gladware.

Give me something really hard to, you know. They're doing stuff that I could never feel like I've seen before. And it's constantly shocking. And it's not just about the shock, though. It isn't a terrifier movie. It's about this emotional devastation, the grief. You know, there's a scene really early on in this at a funeral where, you know, this young boys be forced to do that.

do something that he's not comfortable with. That was such a weird scene. Oh, my God. And it took me right back to my dad's funeral, where my mom was part of a cult and insisted on burying him in that cold and forced us, you know, the kids to do this weird sort of walking around ceremony and chanting ceremony was really not comfortable with. And immediately all those emotions and traumas that I had suppressed for 20-some years, you're flooding right back because of these filmmakers.

Out of nowhere, I was like, okay, well, I don't know exactly what you're tapping here, but it's atavistic and it is familiar and I'm terrified right now. And that's, you know, what can I say? I'm a fan, huge fan. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it sounds like it touched something deep inside both of you that I wish I could have tapped into. I was excited for this because I did love talk to me. Something about that film and the way it deals with loss and grief and channels that through,

like you were saying, while through these very old, archetypes and tropes really spoke to me in ways that I could not get through with this film. And maybe I'm misremembering how brutal that talked to me was. But this one, I wrote in my notes at one point, explive brutal in all caps. And at that point, I had been like looking, as I said, looking through this movie for half of like half the time through my fingers or like looking to the sidewall and avoiding eye contact with the film. It was too much for me. I mean, there's a scene with a kitchen knife that, like, I'm not saying it's the most innovative, rule-breaking thing you've ever seen. But the simple effectiveness of it, I've not been able to wash my mind of it since.

I'll never eat a candle up again. Yeah. And I don't know if it was just like I wasn't in the mood for it. Maybe this just isn't for me. I think part of my issue with it comes from, because I have a pretty high tolerance, generally speaking, for violence and for horror. But with this, I think I just wasn't in the mood for it. I also think I just couldn't deal with the fact that this is a movie where children are being abused in the most horrific way as possible. And so I think like if you are the type of person who that's just like a no-no, I mean, you might have guessed already from how we described this early on.

But like it is too brutal. And the brutality for me overrode all of the emotional stuff that I think is happening here. Like, I recognized it. And I also think that Andy and Piper, the actress playing them, are so good. They're so good. They have an incredible eye for who to put in their films. Unreal. Yeah.

But I guess it just, like, it wasn't enough for me. I was waiting for it to be over. I will say, I'm curious what you guys thought about this. But, like, when it comes to my horror, I tend to not enjoy either supernatural or this kind of stuff that, like, gravitates towards the occult. from the very opening of this movie, it suggests that we are going to be dealing with something along those lines. And it didn't jive for me.

But I also know, like, Jordan, you are someone who is very, I mean, you like all horror. Yeah, yeah, broad palette. What do you make of how that sort of plays out throughout the rest of the film? And through Sally Hawkins' performance, we haven't even really talked about here yet. No, I, and for me, that really is, like,

the tenderness that grounds Andy and Piper's sibling relationship, especially as you learn how it was embattled initially and how they bonded together and it became something so loving. Like that really unfolds, I think, in a really wonderful pace throughout the movie and it feels so earned. And Sally Hawkins' performance is like, my favorite thing about this movie is how it doesn't show you everything immediately, but I think absolutely immediately,

as soon as the siblings walk into Sally Hawkins' house, you are aware of how wrong something is, but the movie is only going to slowly feed you that information for what specifically the movie is talking about. But because you're so destabilized so quickly by how good Sally Hawkins is, I think it makes every, no matter how almost treakly kind

and obsequiously accommodating she is, particularly to Piper. Everything she does is tinged with so much menace It is the granular nuance of the relationships within this movie and the performances that I think to me keeps it from being an occult supernatural spectacle and truly feels like a movie about relationships I was so invested in that when those relationships are being assaulted, I was not relaxed or unstressed for, I think, a single minute of this movie. Yeah, I love that you talk about the duality of Sally Hawkins's performance because I've spilled. too much, but she reminds me a lot of my mother, my relationship with my mother, in that there was so much like goodwill, but there was also this, like, frantic desperation, this tension, this stress, narcissism even, where the goodwill was always underpinned by potential damage.

And it's all meant well, but it's all sort of dialed to 11. Every interaction became with my mother, and also Sally Hoggins in the film, with this sort of, like, everything is fraught. I know that it's based at the bottom on this, like, really kind of essential love for your kids. But the way that you're going about this is causing irreparable harm and trust. But she brings all this out. For me, you know, sort of to Jordan's really eloquent point, I wasn't thinking of it as anything supernatural.

I was thinking of it as the things that we do to each other in families, especially when they begin to fall apart. Yes. All of a sudden now I'm going to, like, gravitate towards the daughter, and I'm going to, like, split the relationship between the siblings because I'm threatened by the male presence. And there's all the stuff that I'm like, Dr. Filling throughout the course of this, you know, trying to understand the psychology that's going on so that the supernatural elements were almost secondary. I was prepared actually the whole movie for the supernatural to be like a red herring because it was so like her, yeah, Sally Hawkins and bouncing off the performances of the actors, Billy Barrett and Sora Wong.

And the hero of this film Jonah Ren Phillips as Little Child Oliver, in everybody is so intensely fractured and like gasoline. and manipulate it and traumatized. I was like, is the supernatural occult part of this, like truly just vaporware? Yeah, yeah. And actually, we are going to boil down to everyone is so cracked that they are willing to go to any length possible to materialize a circumstance or a reality that is like, none of this is happening actually.

Yeah, yeah. I was in a chokehold. Yeah. This entire movie. Well, I will say, like, I may have oversold the supernatural features of this film. I think, again, I have such a low tolerance for it that, like, any time it's even suggested, I'm like, oh, here we go. Here we go. Oh, boy.

But, again, I really wrestle with this because I don't feel as though I can accurately say whether I think it's good or not. I just had such a visceral reaction to it and wanted it to end, like 30 minutes before it ended. this is one of those movies where I'm just like, I don't know, man, maybe it's just not for me. And maybe it is actually good. It's just like, not it all for me. That's how I feel about West Anderson's entire filmography. I get it. I get it.

Jordan, you and I are aligned absolutely on that. Yeah. I also just like in these types of movies, you know, anytime you think of a movie, a horror movie where a child is involved, at least I usually think of like, what is this doing to the actual performer in this movie, especially someone like Jonah Ren Phillips who like, I don't know how. old he is, but he's young. He's very young. Oh, yeah. And so I'm just like, the things that he has to do unbelievable. I hope they're all getting some counseling and therapy.

Joe Bird was similarly put through so much in talk to me. Right. Like, it's amazing to watch interviews with Danny and Michael, and they're so zan, they're zany, Australian menaces. They look like they're constantly having the silly time of their lives. And I am

so blown away. that the pathos of what exists within them and what is so important to them to get out on screen because they are battling things in these movies. And then the rocka-raca, Raka YouTube history of them is so just like out-of-pocket, zany, crazy YouTube stunt guys. Yeah.

You know, the last 20 minutes of this film where Piper is sort of, you know, wandering around the house, everything. It really reminded me of a movie called See No Evil the Mia Farah movie, in which you're spending a long time with like horrible things without being aware of it. And I wonder if that sense of like sort of a general dread is what's really definitive for us in our culture right now. I mean, I walk around every day like there's something really wrong. Why is everybody sort of acting okay? Because nothing is okay. Yeah.

That dread is the dread that I feel here. And Sally Hawkins' character, in a very real sense, is the manufacturer of all of this. She did all of this. What is it? I don't know. Not really. And so it transcends the supernatural for me. Yeah. The things that I'm most impressed by with Danny and Michael that they are capable of is taking, like you said, in Talk to Me, it's like this totem, this old trope of like the archaic thing and the supernatural experience around it. And then like kind of classic elements of the teen horror movie with that amazing scene, the montage where they're all interacting with the hand.

Like the energy and creativity in that scene I just was so blown away by. And then in this movie, too, they are really good at taking things. that are familiar to horror. And what I'm doing, what I think is the kind of coolest thing about the genre, is taking trope or cliche or the things that you expect

and then doing a remix or putting a personal signature on them such that it does the magic trick of making it feel new and to have a low vision character like Piper, played again by Sora Wong, giving such an incredible performance. That is a trope.

Like, what is history littered with, particularly in horror cinema, if not in other rising in a grotesqueification or a condescension to people who are physically different. Like, oh, let's take this, I mean, autism is a superpower, or let's take a character who has a visual impairment, and then have them wander around in robes like a little Chinese Juan ghost child who like couldn't possibly care for themselves. There's an assertiveness and a dignity to the character of Piper.

And so I think they take these things that are so well trodden within the confines of horror and they put this polish on them that gives them something, a level of integrity and a level of distinction and a level of grit and fully embodiedness that makes it like, you understand this enough to put your own spin on it in a way that doesn't feel like ripping, it feels like sincere creation on your part. It's the dignity that you're talking about.

It's dignity. And I don't get that from R.A. Astor's film. I'm sorry. You know, that's another sacred cow like Wesleyan Anderson that I think you're not supposed to touch. but I don't like Ari Aster's movies for the most part because he doesn't give his character's dignity. Yeah. You nail it so hard here with the dignity that Piper has and that Sadd Alkins' character has too.

It's remarkable. They're completely human beings. And they give their characters that dignity, that absolute dignity of their relationship of the nobility of grief, even when it takes a left turn. You know, all this stuff is so remarkable for me, especially, you know, as an old person looking at young people, Piggy was like, really? How do you drink from the old well? How do you know this? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to your point also, just about the way they depict Piper's character, I think it is intentional and crucial that we do get just a few moments where we are seeing how we can imagine Piper being able to see in the moment. We are getting the first person perspective.

At one point in the movie, she actually says, you know, I can see shapes and light. That's what she can But they don't dwell on it. It allows us to both see that perspective and also, you know, as the viewer, you know, fear for her as well. Like we are her, but then we're also like on the outside looking in. And like, I do think that it handles as much as you can handle these types of things of showing this type of brutality and cruelty. I mean, I think it does do a good job of not leaning into those tropes, as you said, Jordan. And even if it wasn't for me, it's okay. It will be for someone like Jordan and Walter, and I love that for you both.

And it's never the kind of movie that I would be like, I mean, if you don't think you can take that stuff, give it a chance. I wouldn't. I would be like, if this sounds like red flags, you'd be like, you should probably skip this one. It's probably going to be too much. So, like, protect your peace. Like, that's not something you want to convince someone to take a chance on if the aftermath of it is going to be like too grievous. For them. Yeah.

I will say, though, like, that does not mean that I am not going to tune in for their next movie. Because I am, I will be curious. Because I still, I'm still holding on to, like, the feelings I had while watching talk to me that, like, maybe, maybe I'll feel that way again about another movie they make. Well, we want to know what you think about bring her back. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash PCH. And on letterbox at letterbox.com slash NPR pop culture. We'll have a link to that in our episode. description. Maybe you'll be into it. Maybe you want. Who knows? But that brings us to the end of our show.

Walter Chow, Jordan Cruciola. Thanks so much for being here. I love talking with you. This is great. Fantastic. See you again. And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio. And you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor free. So please go find out more at plus.mpr.org Or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Hufza-Thathema and Mike Katzv and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Khamin, provides our theme music. Thank you so much for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Aisha Harris, and we'll see you all next time.