The following contains spoilers for Bring Her Back.
Bring Her Back is one of this year’s darkest and most unpredictable horror movies, and it’s finally available to stream on HBO Max. With its supernatural scares and twisted narrative, Bring Her Back is ideal viewing for Halloween this year. The film stars Sally Hawkins as a mysterious single mother who adopts two young teens after a horrible tragedy.
But naturally, there’s more going on in this story than initially meets the eye. Bring Her Back‘s ending reveals that Hawkins’ protagonist has actually been using a supernatural ritual to control the body of a kidnapped child and use him to bring her late daughter back from the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ.
Oliver Is Actually Connor Bird
Towards the end of Bring Her Back, it becomes clear that Laura’s “son” isn’t really her foster child at all, but rather somebody she’s kidnapped and made the victim of some twisted demonic ritual. While there are plenty of clues that point towards this twist throughout the movie, it’s not revealed until Andy (Billy Barratt) goes to the foster agency.
Andy recognizes “Oliver” (Jonah Wren Phillips) as Connor Bird, a young boy who was reported missing weeks ago and whom the local authorities have all but given up on. It’s clear throughout Bring Her Back that Oliver is under some kind of control, as he’s unable to step outside of the chalk ring surrounding Laura’s house, but this is a particularly dark revelation.
It’s eventually revealed that Laura has stumbled across some videotapes of a dark ritual that allows people to return from the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ by having a “host” consume their corpse and “regurgitate” their spirit into a new body. Laura intends to use Connor Bird as this host, infusing her daughter’s spirit into Piper’s (Sora Wong) body.
In order to prepare Connor for the ritual, she invites a demon named Tari to possess his body. This explains why “Oliver” has been so confused and aggressive, as that’s really been Tari acting through Connor Bird’s body. This aspect of Bring Her Back mirrors the Philippou brothers’ previous movie Talk To Me in its dark, twisted depiction of grief.
The Real Oliver Is Laura’s Nephew
The main reason why Laura’s plan doesn’t completely fall apart in Bring Her Back is that it’s somewhat based on the truth. Oliver is a real person — he’s just Laura’s nephew, not her foster son. When she kidnapped Connor Bird, she gave him the name of her nephew so the people around her wouldn’t be too suspicious.
This makes it a lot easier for Laura to get away with her lies, as the community doesn’t pay too much attention to the new child living with her. It also explains one specific moment at the beginning of the film where Piper asks what Oliver’s hair looks like, and Laura instinctively responds red and curly — Oliver’s real hair style.
There are plenty of interesting moments like this throughout the film that tease Laura’s secrets without ever giving them away, making Bring Her Back the perfect film to rewatch over and over again to catch every single detail. The story certainly isn’t straightforward, and the real thematic depth of these decisions isn’t always clear on the first watch.
Why Did Laura Lie About Oliver’s True Idenтιтy?
The most obvious reason that Laura doesn’t come clean about Oliver’s true idenтιтy is that she’s committed a lot of crimes by that point already. Not only has she kidnapped a child and plans to make him consume her son’s corpse, but if there was a law against inviting demons into strangers’ bodies, she’d have broken that one too.
But Laura’s desperation runs much deeper than her surface-level crimes. At its core, Bring Her Back is a story about grief – showing how far people would go to spend one more second with lost loved ones. Laura is completely consumed by her grief, but she totally lacks the self-control and emotional maturity that’s required to move on from this loss.
Instead, she will do anything to bring her daughter back from the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ — no matter how many lives she has to ruin in the process. There’s also the sense that she’s come this far, it would almost be a waste to stop. It’s a skewed way of thinking, but this just demonstrates how much Laura has been consumed by grief.
When Wendy visits Laura’s house to investigate Andy’s suspicions about Connor Bird, it immediately becomes clear how much Laura’s delusions have taken over her life. Instead of accepting the consequences of her actions, or even simply lying about her crimes, she believes that she’ll be able to get Wendy on board with the plan – then kills her when she can’t.
The Philippou brothers are clearly interested in grief as the driving force of their filmography, and they deconstruct it very effectively in this movie. This isn’t just a woman who’s been driven crazy by the loss of her daughter, but somebody who’s created a whole delusory world to live in because it’s easier than simply moving on. This is what separates Bring Her Back from other grief stories.
