Bring her back (2025) & grief in the horror genre

Sally Hawkins as Laura in the 2025 film Bring Her Back

A woman is haunted by the tragic death of her daughter. Can a satanic ritual…Bring Her Back? 

The 2025 film stars Sally Hawkins as Laura, a foster parent who takes in two step-siblings, Piper and Andy, after their dad dies unexpectedly in a tragic accident.

Andy and Piper arrive home from school to find their dad lying on the bathroom floor unconscious with the shower still running. They are then picked up by the foster care system and end up with Laura, who formerly worked with foster kids as a counselor. Piper and Andy’s mother is not in the picture, although it’s never directly explained.

They show up at Laura’s house—a damn nice house, by the way, for the budget of a single foster parent who’s made her living as basically a social worker, but it’s fine, who even checks Zillow listings? Anyway, we quickly learn that Laura had a biological daughter, Cathy, who drowned. We also meet Ollie, who Laura introduces as another foster child.

Right away, the red flags are flying, like Laura introducing her taxidermied dog as the family pet, or Ollie attacking the cat the moment the opportunity strikes. 

It soon becomes clear that Piper is a stand-in for Cathy. Piper is blind, and we learn that Cathy was too. They share other similar characteristics, like their age and their hairstyles. It turns out this is no coincidence—it’s later revealed that Laura orchestrated the dad’s murder and used her connections with the foster system to take custody of Piper. 

As the film progresses, we learn more about Laura’s plan to essentially revive Cathy’s soul and release it into Piper’s body using Ollie as a conduit. Ollie is possessed by a demon with the power to transmit souls into new bodies. This explains Ollie’s strange behavior, like his apparent aggression towards animals, his seemingly insatiable appetite, and what Laura describes as his selective mutism. 

Because Andy is not part of Laura’s plan to bring Cathy back to life, she sneakily attempts to drive a wedge between Andy and Piper. She uses details about Andy’s relationship with his father, which he shares with her in confidence, to manipulate Piper’s feelings towards Andy and lead her to doubt his motives. 

For example, Andy privately admits to Laura that his father was physically abusive towards him, but that Piper was never subjected to any abuse. Laura turns around and tells Piper about it, framing Andy’s choice not to share this with Piper as a malicious breach of trust. 

We eventually discover that Ollie is not, in fact, another foster child, but is actually a missing person who was kidnapped by Laura in order to perform the ceremony that will bring Cathy back to life. The ritual involves literally eating Cathy’s dead corpse, so Ollie is deprived of food in order to stimulate his appetite for the forthcoming ritual, and is often kept locked in a room by himself.

All of this destruction—the physical and psychological torture of Ollie, the wedge driven between Andy and Piper, who have only each other left, as well as their imminent murder—is antithetical to resurrection, which is Laura’s ultimate goal in order to save her daughter. At the core of it all is a lack of integrity; the means unabashedly violate the end objective. 

Sally Hawkins gives a completely deranged performance. She embodies the carefully masked unraveling of a mother in mourning, taking grief to its most illogical conclusion. Her character provokes empathy and fear in the same breath, which, in my estimation, is the determining factor in what makes a compelling villain.

I’m of the opinion that Laura is a good person. Much in the way Ollie is possessed by a demonic spirit, so too is Laura possessed—perhaps not by a spirit in the conventional sense, but by an idea. She is so compelled by the possibility of getting her daughter back that she is willing to sacrifice any notions of morality or virtue, essentially making a deal with the devil. 

The film is a portrait of unresolved grief that has metastasized and taken over her life. There is no correct way to grieve, but there are certainly some bad ways, and storing your dead daughter’s corpse in a deep freezer so you can later extract her soul and bring her back to life, while murdering other children in the process, is one of them. 

But Laura’s decision in the end to spare Piper’s life is redemptive. It’s a recognition of her sacred role as a mother, biological or otherwise, and that trading one child’s life for another will not heal the wound of her daughter’s untimely death. 

Like many other films in the genre, Bring Her Back calls upon loss and grief as a prerequisite for probing the supernatural. As a plot device, the death of a child has the potential to tilt the story in a certain direction—that is, to overwhelm the narrative with sadness and mourning, and undermine the elements that actually make it scary. 

But for me, the film succeeds in balancing these two competing forces. While there are certainly sad moments peppered throughout, like the home video capturing the final moments before Cathy’s death, the sadness is soon replaced by suspense and no shortage of body horror. Ollie eating a fucking kitchen knife is the most disturbing visual I’ve ever seen in my life. 

It also explores the question of what happens to the soul when the physical body dies. One of the most haunting lines in the film is delivered by Laura after attending the funeral of Piper and Andy’s father: “Some people believe the spirit stays in the body for months after death.” 

Anyone with the slightest spiritual inclination typically believes in some version of the soul as its own entity separate from the body. But the idea that a spirit could be trapped in its cadaver indefinitely is existentially terrifying, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since watching the movie a week ago. 

The verdict? Bring Her Back is worth watching (even if you’re squeamish like I am and end up covering your eyes through half of it). If nothing else, it’s a fun watch with the potential to elicit vivid nightmares, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into. But I would argue it offers something more—perhaps a chance at vindication for the formerly possessed.