Bring Her Back

Bring Her Back is the kind of horror film that asks, “What if your foster mom wasn’t just emotionally unavailable—but also into necromancy?” Sally Hawkins stars as Laura, a soft-spoken woman with a tragic past and the kind of energy that says, “I definitely own multiple antique dolls I talk to.” When she takes in two traumatized siblings, Andy and Piper, they quickly realize they’ve been placed in the one foster home where bedtime routines include summoning the dead and burning sage over your Fruit Loops.

The movie kicks off with a séance, escalates with spectral activity, and by the midpoint, someone’s definitely being dragged across the ceiling by regret. Laura’s obsession with resurrecting her dead daughter leads her to conduct increasingly unhinged rituals, one of which may or may not involve chanting Latin over a cassette tape of Enya. Meanwhile, Andy and Piper just want to go to school without having their lunchboxes cursed.

There’s a basement. Of course there’s a basement. In that basement? Possibly the worst crafting project in history: a child-sized wax sculpture wearing her late daughter’s clothes and whispering cryptic phrases like, “It’s almost Thursday.” Critics say it’s a slow burn, but that’s just a polite way of admitting you’ll spend 45 minutes watching Hawkins silently cry in candlelight.

I haven’t seen it, but from the trailer and the sheer number of “ending explained” videos on YouTube, I’m confident it ends ambiguously, in a lightning storm, with at least one child screaming, “You’re not my real mom!”

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 emotionally unstable ouija boards