Abhiroop Das
Helmed by twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, ‘Bring Her Back‘ presents a shockingly unnerving horror-drama where two half-siblings find their lives changed irrevocably following the machinations of their foster parent, Laura. Alongside the duo lies a third foster child, Oliver, who becomes the center of the narrative’s mystery, as he seems to be the key to Laura’s grand plan. In the end, she pulls off a near impossible feat, clearing her path by felling all who stand against her. Assured of her victory, she reels in every major player back to the house, determined to free herself of a past trauma. However, things don’t go as planned, leading to a tussle between the characters’ sense of self. As an occult ritual nears completion, the fate of many lives hangs in the balance. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Bring Her Back Plot Synopsis
The world changes for 17-year-old Andy and his younger half-sister Piper, who has partial sight, after their father, Phil, is found dead inside their shower enclosure. Still dealing with the aftermath, the two are placed in the care of Laura, a former counselor who also fosters an enigmatic child named Oliver, who is selectively mute. Laura herself struggles with the grief of losing her daughter, Cathy, who was also blind, who died in their backyard pool a few years ago. Gradually, Andy develops a growing uneasiness at Laura’s obsessive behaviour towards his sister, while Oliver’s disquieting presence becomes unnerving. Things take a turn when Andy informs the foster mother of his intention to seek guardianship of Piper once he comes of age. Unwilling to let that plan come to fruition, the professional counsellor begins to manipulate the the children.
At the half-siblings’ father’s funeral, Laura starts her plan to debilitate Andy and his relationship with Piper. She steals a lock of their father’s hair, believing that a soul lingers in the dead body. That night, the trio parties and gets inebriated, and Andy and his foster parent share their deeper truths with each other. The former reveals that his father was abusive towards him while being loving towards Piper, which made him jealous in his early years. Laura, in turn, voices her agony, still yearning to hear her daughter’s voice again. However, later that night, she pours her own urine over Andy’s pants while he is fast asleep. Thus making it appear that he wets his bed while sleeping. The teenager’s situation continues to worsen when his efforts to bond with Oliver go awry, with the latter biting into a knife and reacting violently upon being taken beyond the white line surrounding Laura’s residence.
Laura manages to calm him down, before secretly feeding him the lock of then secretly feeds him the lock of Phil’s hair. That night, Andy hallucinates his father, who ambiguously warns, “She’ll die in the rain.” In an attempt to escape, Andy slips and suffers a concussion. While he recovers, Laura takes Piper to a locked shed containing Cathy’s corpse, dresses her in her daughter’s clothes, and prepares her for a resurrection ritual. It is revealed that she has been using Oliver as a vessel for an occult ritual she learned of in an old tape recording. It requires the body of the deceased to be consumed by a demon named Tari, and then regurgitated into a newly dead body of someone killed in a similar fashion. Laura plans to drown Piper in the pool, which will be filled in the upcoming rainstorm.
Following Andy’s return home, Laura continues her manipulative tactics, spraying herself with his cologne before assaulting Piper in her sleep, blaming her brother for the violent act. The resulting chaos leads to Andy acting out aggressively, before heading out to contact his foster agency. Here, he discovers that Oliver’s true identity is Connor Bird and that Laura has kidnapped him. Meanwhile, the little child grows increasingly erratic, consuming objects, biting his foster parent, and damaging the house. After managing to calm him down, she finally starts the ritual, letting him consume her daughter’s flesh. Andy rushes into the house with a social worker named Wendy, determined to uncover the truth. However, Laura rams the two on their way out, instantly killing Wendy. She then finishes the job by drowning Andy in a puddle. With every obstacle cleared, she ushers Piper back home and straight into the ritual.
Bring Her Back Ending: Is Piper Dead? Why Does Laura Let Her Live?
While Piper survives the story, her showdown with Laura leaves an indelible mark on her psyche. From the beginning, things don’t go smoothly for the foster parent, as Piper begins to grow suspicious after hearing Oliver using Andy’s voice to call her upstairs. While Oliver’s actions can’t appear random, it is possible that he is acting on behalf of Andy’s soul, which wishes to protect Piper. Upon sensing danger, the young girl dashes into the washroom and locks herself in while demanding answers. Here, she stumbles upon a body which she confirms to be her brother’s. When Laura breaks in, revealing her plan of drowning her foster daughter as a part of a ritual sacrifice, the young teen has no choice but to fight her way out.
However, she is quickly overpowered and dragged into the pool, where Oliver, seemingly possessed, waits for his cue. As Laura forcibly drowns the young girl, flashes of her daughter appear in her mind, seemingly strengthening her resolve. Meanwhile, Piper desperately tries to break free and rise from underwater. Between gasps, she manages to muster enough strength to scream, calling out for her mother. This moment stumps Laura, who has been forcibly drowning the young girl. As a result, the grieving mother breaks down and apologizes profusely, ultimately letting her victim go.
Laura’s complicated decisions across the spectrum have been marked by a singular wish: her desire to reunite with her daughter, Cathy, who passed away after accidentally drowning. A flashback sequence reveals that the mother did, in fact, jump into the pool to protect her daughter, but it was too late. Thus, her complex was not just one of ignorance of her daughter’s safety, but also that of an active failure. For the same reason, Piper’s plea came as a reminder and a call to action. Throughout the entire series, she attempts to mould Piper into her own daughter through her attire, hairstyles, and eventually, the circumstances of death. However, this moment flips the narrative on its head; now she has a chance to protect her surrogate daughter from dying, and she decides to take a chance at redeeming herself, while simultaneously grasping the gravity of the sin she was about to commit.
Piper’s end of the story, however, reveals another layer to the scene. While she does yearn for her mother, the term does not refer to Laura. It reiterates a previous scene, where the young girl refused to submit to Laura’s fantasies, wishing to be called mother and to continue their life without Andy, whose eventual death comes as a wake-up call for Piper. Her confrontation at the pool, then, is a means of reclaiming her agency and personhood, as shown by her cardigan, which originally belonged to Cathy, coming undone on her way out of the water. This symbolizes a distinction between the two children, one that Laura is forced to accept, as, after recovering her sense of right and wrong, she apologizes to Piper, the person in front of her, instead of her dead daughter.
Piper’s brave quest for freedom continues, as she is targeted by Oliver, another victim like her, whose attachment to the past resides inside him, that is, the flesh he has consumed. As such, Piper liberates him by kicking him in the stomach, before escaping out of the house and into the woods, where she is found by a passing car and rescued. Her final appearance is in the car at a railway crossing with lights flashing on her face. Looking up, she hears a plane and likely remembers her brother’s words, that the souls of the dead fly away in planes and reach the afterlife. The idea that once seemed childish to her now comes as a source of comfort, in stark contrast to Laura, whose fixation with the notion of the soul lingering in the body renders her unable to move on in peace, setting off a chain of events that hurt several innocents in the process.
What Did Laura Do To Oliver? What Happens To the Demon Inside Him?
More than Piper and Andy, Laura’s most unfortunate victim stands to be Oliver, who is revealed to be Connor Bird, a 10-year-old child who disappeared mere days before the half-siblings’ arrival. Therefore, his radical transformation is a bone-chilling example of the horrors humans can inflict upon each other. While the exact process is never shown, it can be assumed that Laura engages in occult practices in order to summon a demon, likely named Tari, and then uses the kidnapped child as the Demon’s vessel. This act in itself is proof of the drastic steps she is willing to take simply in order to resurrect her loved one. She then also creates a protective barrier across her house’s perimeter, confining the Demon inside. Eventually, Connor frees himself by passing through this very barrier and reclaiming his identity.
The Demon’s slow descent deep into the child’s consciousness is visually depicted by the motif of hunger. While initially, Connor, then called Oliver, only displays selective mutism with frequent bouts of anger and a disregard for the self, his actions quickly take a turn for the worse. The hunger for flesh takes form in various, self-mutilative ways, such as chewing through a knife, a table, or the child’s own flesh. Throughout these injuries, Connor seems to be unaffected, indicating the gap between his real and mutated self. However, the toll on his body becomes apparent following the consumption of Cathy’s corpse, which leaves his body burnt and scaly. His eyes glow red as strange protrusions begin to emerge from his head and belly. The child begins to resemble a demon, a cruel fate after enduring untold amounts of abuse.
While many of Connor’s features seem to be nigh undeniably supernatural in nature, there is a case to be made that his condition is also psychological, a result of Laura’s mental abuse. Her career in counselling indicates a proficiency with children’s training and conditioning, and it is possible that she uses those methods to manipulate Connor and erode his identity, replacing it with that of a demon. Therefore, his selective mutism and violent outbursts can also be interpreted as a cry for help from a body and mind that have been subjected to endless torture, leading to self-harm as a coping mechanism. The child’s refusal to exit the house, then, also gains a layer of mental conditioning.
Relief comes for Connor once he stands at the house’s protective circle, and notices a missing poster containing his real identity. This sparks a sense of personal consciousness that has long been buried due to the control of Laura and the Demon. That mechanism is symbolized by the protective barrier itself, which Connor chooses to cross in his quest to recover his identity. The result is a horrific sequence, where he can be seen writhing on the ground, helpless in the face of pain. However, his last scene brings hope, as the police find him on the other side of the line, having exhausted himself. His stomach seems to have recovered to its original size, indicating that Tari and everything he represents are out of Connor’s system. The child musters up enough strength to name himself to the officers, suggesting that he has regained control over himself.
Is Laura Dead? Does She Reunite With Her Daughter?
Laura’s actions ultimately run their course when both the children she was exploiting manage to escape. Defeated, she makes her way back to the cabin, where her grief sits, literally frozen in time. A series of flashbacks reveals a warm mother-daughter relationship, which shows a side of her that now feels almost incomprehensible. Upon reaching Cathy’s frozen body, she discovers that Oliver only managed to eat a single portion of it, that is, the right eye. It is a cruel play of irony, as Cathy had partial sight herself. After lamenting the path that she has taken, Laura drags her daughter out of the freezer and into the pool. Eventually, the officers find her in a gentle embrace with the corpse, floating at the center of the pool. Laura’s fate remains ambiguous, but some features of her ending point in a certain way.
Upon seeing her daughter’s partially consumed corpse, Laura is filled with grief and regret. Unable to bear her sins, she digs deeper into the bite wound that Oliver left on her, drawing blood. Oliver’s consumption of her flesh suggests, through her own occult logic, that a part of her soul now resides inside him, thus making him a permanent proof of her sins. As a result, her self-punishment is an extension of the wound, possibly intended to drain her body out entirely. In previous scenes, the blood loss from her wound temporarily knocks her unconscious, and she barely manages to survive by tying a cloth around it. Now that the cloth is gone, the free flow of blood is likely fatal. As such, her return to the pool can be seen as her decision to make it the site of her death, just like her daughter.
The final scene of the film continues the trend of reclaiming identity and breaking free of the cycle. Understanding that she cannot use artificial means to bring her daughter back to life, Laura chooses to make her way to her daughter instead. Furthermore, instead of treating water as a sign of her trauma, as she does for most of the story, she chooses to end things on an affectionate note. Her positioning, alongside being surrounded by liquid, ultimately resembles a return to the womb, the height of mother and child proximity. The idea of her death is also supported by Phil, that is, the Demon’s ominous declaration of someone dying in the rain. Ultimately, Laura’s story ends in tragedy, that of a helpless mother overcome by her negative emotions and led astray. As director Michael Philippou remarks, every character in the narrative is a victim.
Read More: Where Was Bring Her Back Filmed? All Shooting Locations
