When we meet Laura, she is showing Andy and Piper around her home, a seemingly inviting abode…save for the drained pool and her taxidermied pet dog presiding over the kitchen. (You get the sense she has trouble letting things go.) From the jump, Laura has a deranged warmth that, because of the film’s setup, we know to fear. But Hawkins approaches the role with so much subtlety and innate charisma, it’s impossible not to empathize with her at certain turns. To like her, even. Despite the Phillipous’ clear homage to “psycho-biddy” flicks, a subgenre of psychological thrillers that center on unhinged older women, Laura feels three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood. She has tchotchkes cluttering her shelves and pet chickens in the yard. She blasts corny EDM and gets hammered with her foster kids. She wears cozy sweaters and suede clogs and big, candy-colored earrings, like a crazed Ms. Frizzle.
During production, actors personalized their characters by tweaking dialogue and selecting some of their costume pieces; Hawkins went further and would buy items in character, decorating Laura’s house on top of the existing set. That care and attention to detail seep into Hawkins’ performance, which flits between expressions of fragility, slanted charm, and psychotic desperation. In a particularly affecting scene, Laura pleads with a social worker who disrupts the sinister plot she’s been crafting. “Please let me do this!” she wails repeatedly, clutching the arm of her unwanted guest. It’s not the cry of a mustache-twirling villain—but a devastated parent who would do anything to alter the painful past.
There are a number of small scenes throughout Bring Her Back that splice visceral horror tropes next to occasionally more unsettling glimpses of human vulnerability and error. Early in the film, Andy watches as medics transport his dad’s dead body out of their home. Though the moment is smeared in dramatic score, a dull clanging pierces through; the EMTs can’t get the gurney wheels to glide out of the doorway. They attempt this feat several times, making clumsy bashing sounds against the metal lip, before they can finally roll it away. It’s a brief detail that touches on the cruel banality of death. Mourning be damned; there are bodies to bag and papers to sign.
Even Laura’s wicked ceremony can be mundane at times; she watches what can only be called instructional cult videos, where the stages of the ritual are demonstrated in grainy snuff films. It’s another concept that could have gone comically awry (cults make workplace training content?), but the found footage is so wretched, the fact that it could be sitting in a pile of your aunt’s home videotapes makes it all the more terrifying. The Phillipous’ only give us a taste of this imagery, which exemplifies their general restraint when it comes to exposition. Perhaps the best part of Bring Her Back is the directors’ unwillingness to explain every detail of the ritual and its mythology. We understand its purpose in flashes of scenery and from Laura’s sole despairing wish. The ceremony’s provenance, whether it will even work or not, are inessential. The mystery is far more interesting: What horrors can be wrought by a mother’s love?
