2025 • Australia
A foster home, a grieving mother and the sort of childcare arrangement that ought to come with a ritual safety inspection.
In this episode of FolknHell, Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall take on Bring Her Back (2025), Danny and Michael Philippou’s follow-up to Talk to Me, and quickly discover that this is not one for a quiet solo evening with the lights off. The film follows step-siblings Andy and Piper after the sudden death of their father, placing them in the care of Laura, a former grief counsellor played by Sally Hawkins with a smile that should probably trigger a safeguarding referral. Also in the house is Ollie, a strange, silent child whose behaviour suggests that something in Laura’s home has gone badly, bloodily wrong. “May I use the vernacular for a moment? It shat us up, I think it’s fair to say.” FolknHell host, Andy Davidson
The hosts are unusually rattled by this one. Bring Her Back is not just a spooky foster-care nightmare, but a full-bodied horror experience built on grief, manipulation, occult ritual and some truly horrible acts of chewing. Dave’s early advice is brisk and useful: “Don’t watch it alone.”
From there, the episode circles the question that FolknHell can never quite leave alone: is this actually folk horror? There is no maypole, no village committee, no helpful old pub landlord telling outsiders not to go up to the big house. Instead there is an old ritual glimpsed through ropey VHS footage, a magic circle around a house, a stolen child, a dead daughter, and a desperate woman trying to force the rules of grief to bend. Dave sees it as more Lovecraftian and occult than properly folk horror. David is more persuaded by the old ritual and the isolated domestic space. Andy, after the usual scientific dithering, argues that the ritual at the heart of the story gives it enough folk horror weight.
They also talk about the film’s nastier pleasures: body horror that made them recoil, the sensitive use of Piper’s blindness, Sally Hawkins’ deeply unpleasant brilliance, and whether the film’s workmanlike style matters when the experience itself is this tense. The result is a lively, nervous, slightly traumatised conversation about grief, old magic, bad parenting and why some homes should come with a white circle painted round them for everyone’s benefit.
After their father dies in tragic circumstances, step-siblings Andy and Piper are placed with Laura, a former grief counsellor whose warmth soon begins to curdle. Piper is blind, Andy is close to turning eighteen, and both children are vulnerable in different ways. Laura already has another child in her care, the silent and deeply strange Ollie, who appears bound by something more than trauma.
As Andy grows suspicious, Laura begins to isolate him from Piper and from the authorities, using her professional credibility and maternal performance to make him seem unstable. Beneath the foster-home surface lies a ritual connected to Laura’s drowned daughter, old VHS instructions, a contained child, and a plan to bring the dead back through means best not attempted in any kitchen, garden shed or municipal swimming pool.
The hosts end up with a cautious yes, but it is not a clean one. Dave is the sceptic, arguing that Bring Her Back feels more Lovecraftian than folk horror, especially in its concern with occult reanimation, bodily transformation and arcane process. For him, the missing piece is the wider community: Laura is isolated, but she is not the representative of a village, cult settlement or inherited rural order. She is one desperate woman with a VHS tape and a plan that would make social services faint.
Andy and David are more willing to let it through the gate. The film has a ritual, a belief system, a magic boundary and the strong sense that Laura is repeating something older than herself. David points to the discovered, half-understood ritual as a convincing folk horror element, while Andy argues that the drama is driven by magic with rules, traditions and consequences. The old knowledge may arrive by videotape rather than parchment, but it still has teeth.
So the verdict is folk horror adjacent, perhaps folk horror by way of modern witchcraft and Lovecraftian body horror. It lacks the classic isolated community, but the house becomes its own cursed territory, and Laura’s grief turns domestic space into ritual ground.
- Grief as possession Laura is not simply mourning her daughter. She is trying to overwrite death itself, turning grief into a set of instructions, substitutions and sacrifices.
- The house as ritual territory The white circle around Laura’s home gives the domestic setting a magical border. This is not a village in the old folk horror sense, but it is still a sealed world with its own dreadful logic.
- Body horror and appetite The hosts linger, understandably, on the film’s most revolting physical moments. Knives, counters and flesh all become part of a horror built around consumption, transformation and the body refusing to behave.
- Piper’s vulnerability and agency The episode praises the film for not using Piper’s blindness as a cheap scare machine. Her impairment raises the tension, but the film also treats her as resourceful, observant and capable.
- Manipulation in plain sight Laura’s horror is not only supernatural. As a trusted adult and grief counsellor, she knows how to make Andy seem unreliable, which makes the social and psychological threat feel horribly plausible.
- Old magic through modern media The ritual arrives through battered VHS footage rather than folklore handed down beside a fire. That makes the film’s folk horror status messier, and more interesting.
Bring Her Back scores a respectable 21 out of 30 from the FolknHell tribunal, though not without disagreement. Dave gives it a five, partly because he finds the folk horror case stretched and the filmmaking more functional than striking. Andy and David both go higher, landing on eights, largely because the film works so powerfully as an experience of dread, disgust and maternal madness. “Don’t watch it alone.” FolknHell host, Dave Houghton
The hosts agree that it is a strong horror film, and at times a punishing one. Sally Hawkins is horribly effective, the children are excellent, and the body horror is not for the delicate of biscuit. As folk horror, it is not the purest specimen in the jar, but the ritual, the magic circle, the old VHS ceremony and the dead-child resurrection business earn it a place somewhere on the FolknHell map. Watch it with company. Preferably company you trust around sharp objects.
How each host rated this film