The best horror film of 2025, and quite possibly the best film of the year period. The
Philippou brothers'
Talk To Me was an impressive debut that outclassed the annual teen horror fare, but with
Bring Her Back, I really think they've graduated to an enduring horror classic. Only time will tell of course, but revisiting A24's blu-ray reconfirmed everything I experienced when I saw it the first time: a consistently intelligent, taught horror story that manages to balance the authentic human drama and the supernatural through and through. Like if you look at
Hereditary, another generally first class horror drama (are the kids still saying "elevated?"), but all the witchy stuff in the last act betrays the weight of everything that led up to it. It's a really tough balancing act to pull off, keeping these two disparate elements perfectly in tune with each other from beginning to end.
The Exorcist managed it, and
Bring Her Back manages it. And that's on top of everything else it nails.
This movie asks a lot of its child actors, yet gets excellent,
nuanced performances out of each of them (actually, something it has in
common with
The Exorcist and
Hereditary); but it's
Sally Hawkins (
The Shape of Water) who really blows you away here, somehow managing to be the most lovable and most horrible at the same time, without sacrificing her perfect veracity for a single moment. And when I say "most horrible," yeah, this movie goes hard. Uncompromising is the word; there's no place this movie is afraid to go, but it also never veers away from its sympathetic human story for cheap shocks - not that it fails to shock. It's got an effective, minimalistic score, terrific camerawork and some seriously unnerving special effects. And it looks great in 4k.
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2025 A24 UHD.
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A24's UHD frames the film in its OAR of 2.00:1, except for a few scenes that shift to 1.78:1 (an intentional aspect of the film), like the last shot directly above. Now,
Bring Her Back was shot on digital, so there's no film grain to judge, not even "fake grain" like on
Showing Up. So if you look at all that bokeh behind Hawkins in that second set of shots, for example, it's nice and smooth, but all of her dangling hairs are delicately captured and discernible in front of it, with no hint of blocking, banding or pixelation. These guys don't cut any corners with their encodes, and in this case, they've even sprung for a triple-layer disc.
And as with the previous A24 discs we've looked at,
BHB comes with an impressive 7.1 TrueHD mix, an English descriptive track and optional English & Spanish subtitles.
The Philippou brothers provide a highly enthusiastic audio
commentary and also contribute to a good, 20-minute behind the scenes
featurette. Besides that, they've included one not particularly
compelling deleted scene; but they did talk about it in the commentary.
So if you listened to that, it's nice to be able to actually see it.
Finally, we get the "Russian video" which is the VHS tape within the film
that Hawkins' character keeps referring to - handy if any viewers at
home want to try bringing back someone from the dead. Also included are
the standard six art cards.
Most of you guys probably guessed this would be how I ended my Four
A24s series: their biggest, most successful cult horror title of the
year (
Marty Supreme was their biggest money maker in general), and such an artistic triumph. I'm happy to be Mr. Obvious, though, when it comes to such a satisfying film. and thank goodness, the quality of its physical release lives up to it. In a couple years, I could see Second Sight coming through, conducting a bunch of additional cast and crew interviews, recording a couple video essays, and releasing an even more packed special edition, probably in a great big box with a hardcover book. But they're not likely to improve on this presentation of the film itself, and the most compelling extra will still probably be this commentary. So this is a pretty safe investment and just a highly entertaining disc.
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