Let’s make this simple: You want to know if there are any post- or mid-credits scenes in Bring Her Back. The answer is no, there are none.
Warning: The rest of this article contains full spoilers for Bring Her Back.
After making a distinct impression with their critically and commercially successful 2023 debut feature Talk To Me, all eyes were on twin filmmakers Danny and Michael Phillipou as they prepared their next project. That wound up being Bring Her Back, now premiering in theaters, but that wasn’t always going to be their second film. They were actually in talks to direct a live-action Street Fighter movie, but that fell through because of scheduling issues, leading the twins to refocus their efforts on their comfort zone: discomforting, low-budget horror films. Reviews for Bring Her Back, including IGN’s, have skewed positive, although with maybe not quite as unanimous praise as Talk To Me received.
Starring Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt and newcomer Sora Wong, Bring Her Back is high on gore and unsettling implications, but it also leaves a few too many things unexplained. Let’s dive in and explore all the details and questions we have about Bring Her Back.
Bring Her Back Ending Explained
If you’ve ever had concerns about the foster home system, Bring Her Back isn’t going to allay them. The film stars Sora Wong as Piper and Billy Barratt as Andy, an Australian younger stepsister and older stepbrother duo who are placed in foster care after the death of their father. Despite originally intending to place them in separate homes, Andy succeeds in convincing their caseworker Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton) to keep the pair together by emphasizing Piper’s blindness. With only three months until he turns 18, Andy plans to apply for guardianship of Piper once he comes of age so the pair can live on their own. Seems easy enough, until Sally Hawkins’ Laura comes into the picture as their new foster mother.
Initially presenting herself as a kind, temporary solution to Andy and Piper’s problems, Laura has several red flags flying over her head. She’s taking care of another child, Oliver, who doesn’t speak and seems to have unresolved violent tendencies. She is constantly dismissive of Andy while doting on Piper. She lets the kids get drunk after their father’s funeral just because it will be fun. And it quickly becomes clear she’s trying to mess with Andy’s mind by pouring her own urine onto his sleeping body so he thinks he’s wetting the bed. Anyone who’s seen a movie before will be able to tell Laura is bad news within her first few minutes of screentime, and if you were waiting for a twist on that… well, no, there isn’t one.
The big reveal here is that Laura is performing some kind of Satanic ritual she got off a VHS tape (do they just sell those at the corner store down in Australia?) that will allow her to resurrect the soul of her deceased biological daughter Cathy. Apparently you need three bodies to do it: the body of the person you’re trying to resurrect (Cathy, being kept in a freezer in Laura’s shed), the person you’re going to put the soul into (Piper, who is blind just like Cathy), and an intermediary in which to store the soul until the transfer is ready (Oliver, which is why he’s mute and also voraciously hungry). The movie is fuzzy on the details, but it appears that the intended vessel to take in the soul needs to be similar to the deceased and also needs to die in the same way, here, meaning drowning in Laura’s pool. But Laura first needs to get rid of Andy, so she frames him for attacking Piper in her sleep.
Despite having a troubled past, Andy insists to Wendy that Laura is up to no good. Wendy and Andy go back to Laura’s place, where Oliver has gone off the rails with hunger. He’s eaten all the food in the house, chowed down on the wooden countertop, and even taken bites out of Laura’s arm (and his own, for good measure). Wendy notices that Laura is bleeding when she arrives, leading Laura to freak out and demand that Wendy let her finish what she’s doing so Cathy can be resurrected. When it becomes clear that Wendy and Andy will expose her, Laura runs both of them over with her car, killing Wendy instantly, and then drowns an incapacitated Andy in a puddle in her driveway.
Laura goes to perform the ritual, which involves Oliver eating pieces of Cathy’s corpse that seem to contain her soul (?). Laura then takes Piper and tries to drown her in the pool. But she stops at the last second because a struggling Piper calls out “Mom!”, apparently awakening some level of remorse in her. Piper escapes, running out to the road where some passersby find her. Oliver, who is a missing child that Laura kidnapped, vomits up some brownish fluid (the soul, we guess) and returns to normal as police find him. Laura then takes what remains of Cathy’s body and cradles it in the pool as the authorities raid her house. The end.
Does Bring Her Back Have a Post-Credits Scene?
As mentioned above, Bring Her Back has no mid- or post-credits scenes. You’re free to leave the theater once the credits start rolling. Those expecting some sort of final twist or even a tease for the Phillipous’ next project (similar to what Osgood Perkins did in The Monkey), may come away disappointed. That’s all there is.
Wait, Is That It?
The biggest surprise of Bring Her Back is that there isn’t much of a surprise at all. Just going by the premise and title, the exact movie you’re likely expecting is what takes place. A dark maternal figure is driven to incredible violence by her grief over a lost child, intending to resurrect them even if it means killing other children. The film doesn’t elaborate on Laura much outside of her past as a counselor, which is a detail that’s seemingly only there so we can have a scene where Andy lowers his guard and tells more of his backstory to her. Andy and Piper’s father being abusive and Andy hitting Piper once when she was younger are also just thrown in but not fully dealt with within the narrative.
We’re also curious about what this ritual entails and how it all works. We can broadly guess at the mechanics based on evidence in the film, like Oliver not being allowed to leave an area designated by a white painted circle around Laura’s property. But why is Oliver so hungry, to the point of chomping down on wood and a steak knife? Doesn’t he just need to eat part of Cathy to get the soul? Speaking of which, why does he only eat a small part of Cathy and not the entire corpse? And if he’s so violently hungry to the point of attacking Laura and even eating part of his own arm, how has Laura kept him under control all this time? And if he’s so important to Laura’s plans, why did she ever leave Oliver home alone with Andy? That last one was seemingly only done so that Andy (and the audience) can learn how messed up Oliver is by trying to eat the steak knife, but it makes no sense given Laura’s motivations.
Perhaps these questions were answered in deleted scenes, or maybe we’re thinking too hard about it. After all, it seems that Bring Her Back is more interested in freaking its audience out than making sure all of its logic is consistent. Either way, the movie is creepy and gory enough that we’re curious to see what comes next from these up-and-coming horror filmmakers.
What did you think of Bring Her Back? Let us know in the comments!
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.
