Don't ask what Sally Hawkins keeps in the freezer

Times

2 days ago

There are the horror movies that make you jump out of your skin and there are the horror movies that get under your skin and stay there. The Australian film-making brothers Danny and Michael Philippou were responsible for the extremely well-made Talk to Me (2023) — a séance-gone-awry shocker full of horrifying images of self-harm and the squelchiest sound design of any film in recent memory. You couldn't look away from the screen because then it was somehow worse.
Now they are back with something similar — Bring Her Back is a tale of grief and dread with horrifying images of self-harm and squelchy sound design — all wrapped around a modern-day version of Hansel and Gretel.
The witch of the story is a former child counsellor named Laura (Sally Hawkins) who lives in a cabin in the woods. Decorated in cheerful, hippy-dippy colours, it has a taxidermied dog, a mysterious chalk circle and an empty swimming pool in which Laura lost her daughter to drowning. Now she keeps a little feral boy (Jonah Wren Phillips), shaven-headed and mute, locked in a room. You don't want to know what she keeps in the freezer.
All this would surely constitute enough red flags to set any foster agency on high alert (has nobody learnt the lesson from Psycho about taxidermied animals?), but the film's secret weapon is Hawkins, from Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky and Paddington.
Dressed in reassuring knits, she rabbits away in a stream-of-consciousness fashion that pushes her flaky persona to the edge of unsettling and cloaks her trespasses with a chipper smile. The latest unsuspecting adoptees to come under her care are 17-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger, partially sighted sister, Piper (Sora Wong), who have been assigned to Laura after the death of their father.
Everyone seems to be grieving somebody. As with Talk to Me, you're not sure whether you're in for a horrorfest or a counselling marathon. What we get is a mix of the two — a marathon of gaslighting — as Andy smells a rat and Laura does everything she can to turn his sister against him.
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Disappointingly, the film is far more interested in Andy than Piper, who is exploited for traditional blind-girl-in-peril frights. The idea that she is slower than her brother to notice Laura's evil vibe is unimaginative to say the least: wouldn't her sixth sense be more developed? I would have loved to have seen a film from her point of view, blur and all. True, she cannot see the grainy snatches of video that Laura has on repeat in her living room that tip us off to the horrifying ritual to come.
You want to look away and you don't dare because, as with Talk to Me, the greatest shocks are delivered by the sound engineer Emma Bortignon's sound mix, one that goes way beyond the stabbed watermelons of countless horror films. Get ready to be excruciated by the sound of kitchen knife on gums, and teeth on splintering wood. You cannot say you haven't been warned.★★★★☆18, 104min
August will go down as the month Pedro Pascal earned his movie star spurs. He's in three films this summer, starting with The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Matt Shakman's reboot of the Marvel comic book, in which Pascal plays Reed Richards, the elasticated superhero at the head of a family of superheroes, including Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), who has a baby on the way. Can they juggle saving the world with childcare? Will the baby also be superpowered? Will they need extra-strong diapers? Does this set-up sound the teensiest bit familiar?
Set in a retro 1960s world of chrome and neon, Fantastic Four: First Steps is probably best thought of as an intermittently entertaining live-action remake of Brad Bird's 2004 classic, The Incredibles. (Shakman even nabbed Michael Giacchino for the score.) The film is at its best in the first 20 minutes when it introduces everyone — with the Human Torch, Johnny Storm, coming in handy during a power cut, and Sue Storm making herself invisible to provide her own ultrasound. Her greatest trick, though — probably the film's best moment — is giving birth in zero gravity while escaping the pull of a black hole, which makes the real-time childbirth that Kirby enacted for Pieces of a Woman (2020) look like a walk in the park.
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But oh dear, the plot, which follows the time-honoured Marvel two-step: introduce the villain, then kill time for two hours waiting for him to arrive and play wrecking ball with New York. The villain is a lumbering galactic deity named Galactus (Ralph Ineson), who plans to destroy Earth unless the four hand over little baby Franklin. As a plot idea this is something of a nonstarter, involving a lot of tedious wrangling from which no one — not the Fantastic Four, nor the people of Earth demanding the baby's sacrifice — comes out looking good. The climactic bout is a ferocious yawn. Once you've seen one skyscraper crumble like cake, you've seen them all.★★★☆☆12A, 95min
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