Wicked, naturally

In Bring Her Back, Sally Hawkins takes horror to heart

- ERIK PIEPENBURG

Actress Sally Hawkins has a to-die-for pedigree. She's been nominated twice for Academy Awards, once as a creature’s lady love in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water and again for Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, in which she played a depressed working-class woman opposite Cate Blanchett. Her British stage credits include plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov and García Lorca, and on Broadway, Shaw.

Bring Her Back, Hawkins’ latest film (in cinemas), is also a plum project. It’s from the prestige art-house distributor A24, and it’s the second feature by Danny and Michael Philippou, the twin Australian You-Tubers-turned-directors who became Hollywood famous after their possession drama Talk To Me became one of A24’s biggest hits in 2023.

But Bring Her Back is also a malign and at times shockingly gruesome horror movie — critics have noted its “restlessly mounting anguish” and have called it the “feel-bad movie of the year”.

It remains to be seen if genre-averse fans who know Hawkins from her acclaimed work, including appearances in two Paddington films, will turn out for a movie that has a scene between a young boy and a giant kitchen knife that even gorehounds may have a hard time stomaching.

To hear Hawkins explain it, she said yes to the film precisely because of its weight — or rather, lack of it.

“There's no fat on it. It's muscular,” she said last month during a phone call from London. “The writing just hits hard, and you know it comes from a place of real understanding.”