BRING HER BACK (2025)

If Bring Her Back were the Philippou brothers’ first film, I’d feel the urge to be kinder to it. It has all the hallmarks of an early feature from filmmakers who show promise and move on to more daring, polished, and interesting projects. It displays a lot of the same thematic and visual elements that made their Talk to Me such a gripping film, but lacking the terrifying logic that guided it. It’s like looking back at Killer’s Kiss after watching The Shining, and seeing the filmmaker play the right notes but not quite master the music yet. The trouble is that Talk to Me was their first film, and Bring Her Back their second. It’s definitely a film by the same artists, but it backs off before ramping to the heights of terror that Talk to Me did. It feels like a less mature work.

It does, admittedly, feature two exceptional lead performances by two young actors, Billy Barratt and Sora Wong, that elevate it above what its facile story offers. If this movie puts them on the map, it's done its job.

When step-siblings Andy (Barratt) and Piper (Wong) find their father dead, Family Services has no option but to place them both in foster care. Because Andy will turn 18 in a few months, they're confident they can tough it out until then. Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former social worker who lives in a remote mid-century modern labyrinth of a house (an effective horror movie setting for any A24 movie like this one), is eager to take in Piper, who is sight impaired, but needs some convincing before she allows Andy to come along. It isn't long before Andy begins to notice warning signs that Piper doesn't, particularly the feral child named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) who appears to be living there. When we learn (early on--not a spoiler) that Laura had a daughter who was also blind, and who recently passed away, it's pretty easy to put together who the Her is in the title, and who will need to go away for Her to be brought back.

Even with only their second feature, the directors already display a unique style that many filmmakers are likely to mimic in the years ahead. They have a way of composing a shot, through the use of close-ups as well as slow zooms, pans, and turns, that subtly suggests something is wrong even when everything seems to be in its place. The high point is in their portrayal of Oliver as the linchpin to the movie's plot: he's the only part of the movie with any mystery behind it, and a kitchen table scene between him and Andy is probably the only scene in the movie where I had truly no idea what would happen, and was gleefully and gruesomely surprised.

The directors mine a good bit of tension from Andy's growing frustration at knowing what his happening to him and his sister and having no way to get them out, and Barratt believably plays Andy as a flawed and often impulsive teenager who nonetheless still wants to be a good older brother. The relationship between Andy and Piper always feels genuine.

The story, though, isn't strong enough to sustain the movie. The plot feels very much like a Goosebumps novel: for better or worse, it pretty much goes where you think it will, and doesn't make many detours. Once we surmise what's happening, very early, a lot of it feels like going through the motions. Great horror filmmakers are able to tease us with what's going to happen but leave some mystery as to how it will get there, and there are some great moments in Talk to Me where we can sense what's coming but not exactly how. Here we mostly know how as well, especially in the last act, which involves a lot of characters driving back and forth to and from places, and features my least favorite movie trope: a car coming out of nowhere and smacking one of the characters by surprise. It should have been retired after Final Destination, and even the newest entry in that series chose to cheekily make fun of this cliche rather than repeat it.

The best I can say about Sally Hawkins's performance is that she embodies Laura in exactly the way the filmmakers need her to. They ought to have been more ambitious with her. Hawkins is capable of easily transitioning from an eccentric to a monster, but the filmmakers make her a little bit too much of each. The more subtle ways she tries to split up the two siblings are appropriately eerie, including baiting Andy into violence as well as one especially nasty way of gaslighting him that I won't reveal. However, certain scenes seem to set up a different, more explicitly cruel and crass character that doesn't jell with what follows. For instance, the scene at their father's funeral feels like it was included so the filmmakers could get something gross and off-putting into their movie; it paints Laura as a dangerous kook rather than a calculated villain. The horror might have arisen from her outward friendliness and trustworthiness while her devious side would come from her grief and desperation.

Bring Her Back is a swing and a miss, even if it's a more satisfying miss than most. Those who haven't seen Talk to Me will find a similar frightening intensity in that film that ratchets slowly throughout it, but with a better story. The Philippous are still the real deal, and I'm still excited to see what they come out with next.

** 1/2 out of ****

FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES (2025)

One thing I appreciate about the Final Destination series is that it's managed to mine unthought-of opportunities for bloodshed and brutality on screen, yet it's usually stopped a thin, thin hair short of becoming cynical. As many tightly choreographed elaborate death scenes as there are, it always runs the risk of becoming Friday the 13th with the figure of Death as the killer instead of Jason. The better entries (1, 2, 5, and this one) treat their characters as more than just fodder for destruction; rather--and this is thanks to Glen Morgan and James Wong, who made the first and still the best one--they have actual questions and actual fears about (small D) death that are exacerbated when (big D) Death comes for them. The only truly bad entry (4--er, forgive me--The Final Destination) had characters that merely filled in the dull blank spots between the big death set pieces. (I have complicated feelings about Final Destination 3, which is some people's favorite but didn't quite do it for me.)

Because the series has become famous for its increasingly gruesome Rube Goldberg-esque death scenarios, it's easy to forget how meditative the first Final Destination was. It wasn't afraid to be about these kids truly emotionally grasping with surviving a plane crash they were supposed to die on, and coming to terms with having been psychically granted a second chance. This direction is especially clear if you watch the film's original ending, available on the DVD but rejected by test audiences for being too somber and having no big twist. I kinda like that one better. 

It was the sequel that upped the gore ante, and Final Destination: Bloodlines is much more in line with 2 than 1 in that regard (it even contains multiple cheeky callbacks to That Log Truck, which are welcome). Death is the star here, and the character drama often takes a back seat. That doesn't make the emotional side of the film less important, though I do wish the filmmakers would have put a little more than cursory effort into defining the family at the center. People come in and out of the movie with some perfunctory explanations for their presence or absence, and only the slightest justification for their existence beyond being impaled or immolated or crushed to death.

But still: ho boy, it is thrilling. The opening sequence is a stunner, probably second only to the highway disaster at the beginning of 2 as the best anchor scene for one of these movies. I won't reveal what happens: only that it involves a Very Tall Tower similar to the Space Needle in Seattle, a band playing "Shout" to a happily stomping crowd on the dance floor, and a kid who's the most awful little shit not born in Midwich or Derry. It's seen from the point of view of Iris (Brec Bassinger), but after her vision of mass destruction we fast forward two generations to Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), Iris's granddaughter, who after a series of nightmares drives home from college to investigate the grandmother she'd never known. This, of course, leads to Death targeting Stefani and the rest of her family in excitingly terrifying ways.

The family drama around Stefani's absence, her relationship with her brother Charlie (Teo Briones), and the disappearance of their mother (Rya Kihlstedt, wasted here*), seems like a rushed and functional way to get to the bloodshed. Still, the movie isn't exhausted of an emotional core: the relationship between Stefani's two cousins, brothers Erik (Richard Harmon) and Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), is surprisingly heartfelt and provides some moving moments amid the destruction.

The other surprisingly touching element of the film is the presence of the late Tony Todd, whose last film this was. He's become a staple of the series, even though his character has never quite been pinned down. He's either the devil, or an angel, or a survivor, or a psychic, or maybe he's all those things. His exact identity is revealed in this film, but that's not even the real point. His tall imposing figure and deep voice seem in themselves to intone some kind of knowledge from the Beyond. Here we see him visibly withered (he was already dying of cancer during filming) and there's a hint of resignation to his sage advice. It's a sort of farewell that I didn't see coming, and a cinematic sendoff that truly understands who Tony Todd was and what he meant for horror. In a series infamous for preferring the sloppy over the sentimental, this is a powerful moment.

The other welcome appearance from beyond the grave is Shirley Walker, who contributed the theme music that's been used for every one of the Final Destination movies. She was also one of the greats, and her haunting score has always perfectly suited this series. It's one of the many elements that has generally lifted these movies above simple slashers and into something a little more ambitious, and fun.

*** out of ****

*Note: Everyone should see Kihlstedt in Sebastian Gutierrez's made-for-cable remake of Roger Corman's The She Creature. She played the title and titular she creature.

THE SUBSTANCE (2024)

You've heard of a satire being too on-the-nose. The Substance is on the nose, in the eyes, all over the face, and gummed up in your hair. That works to its advantage sometimes, but at other times the whole-plane absurdity undercuts the truly interesting logic of its premise. As it is it’s an enjoyably wacko excursion in Cronenbergian body horror, but it might have been more.

Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle (no relation to the Japanese detergent magnate, I assume), a Jane Fondaesque actress who’s made her living in middle age by hosting a daytime women’s fitness show. When the network executive (a snarlingly disgusting Dennis Quaid, having a blast) fires her on her birthday, she coincidentally receives an invitation to partake in a treatment to make her younger again. I won’t reveal how it works (that’s part of the fun), but it involves injecting herself with the title and titular Substance, a vial of neon green liquid that looks like Ecto Cooler™️. This creates a young doppelganger (Margaret Qualley) with whom Elisabeth is allowed to trade places for a week at a time. The kit comes with an ominous message: “Remember, you are one.”

The shadowy corporate bioengineering surrounding the Substance is one of the movie’s more satisfying creations. Elisabeth is led through cryptic phone calls and professional but foreboding mailers to a property deep in the slums of Hollywood, through a rollup door that only opens halfway (forcing her to supplicate herself), to a sanitized white locker room where she picks up her equipment without any contact. The room mirrors the sanitized white bathroom at her apartment where most of the movie’s more gruesome action takes place. 

Like Coralie Fargeat’s previous film Revenge, The Substance is a gradually spiraling horror drama about a woman trying to claw her way back after being destroyed by men. But Revenge began with a truly terrifying situation (a young woman trapped in a remote location with a group of violent rapists) and gradually built to an oddly logical level of absurdity (if I recall correctly, a climactic scene featured the heroine attempting to evade her attacker while he slowly bled to death, all the while trying not to slip and fall in the blood). The Substance, unfortunately, is wafting through crazytown all the way through, with too little of the real horror it hints at. 

The male villains representing the sexist system that envelops Elisabeth and then rejects her are sometimes funny, but are generally too goofy to be as insidious as they ought to be. Buffoonish and threatening certainly aren’t mutually exclusive—just look at Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, or Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, or anyone in the Trump Administration. But Fargeat can’t find the right balance and the men end up as caricatures rather than as logical exaggerations of their real-world parallels. Harvey Weinstein, the namesake of the Quaid character, didn’t merely reject older actresses in favor of nubile youngsters; he used his position to take advantage of them physically and held their careers hostage for it. 

The movie’s version of that systemic assault is absolutely chaste by comparison. The symbol of the lowest level of cultural degradation is… a fitness show that allows people to stare at boobs and butts? Give me a break. All this cartoonishness does is allow any of Fargeat’s possible targets to escape unscathed. Would any of the Harvey Weinsteins of the world feel confronted here? Even Quaid himself, a vocal Trump supporter married to a yoga instructor half his age, seems not to have felt his ears burning. 

Though Qualley is believable as Elisabeth’s younger self and later nemesis (named Sue), her scenes are not as interesting as Moore’s if only because her dalliances in her younger body are conventional and expected. She sleeps with young hot guys, she drinks and does drugs, she uses her younger body at the older one’s expense. Her inevitable disobedience of the “rules” of the Substance leads to horrific transformations. Don’t google it before you see it, but the creators here seem to have taken a lot of inspiration from Rob Bottin. If that means something to you, you’ll know what to expect. 

The movie’s lone oasis of subtlety is Moore herself, whose performance is a deeply felt essay of a fallen idol whose self-loathing has been set in concrete by the men who control her career (much like her Hollywood Walk of Fame Star, the image of which begins the movie). She’s the reason the movie works at all, and imbues all of her physical transformations with a genuine hope and sadness. When the Substance takes its toll on her, her growing sense of being trapped in her aging body, while a younger person reaps the benefits, makes for the movie’s best and most heartbreaking scenes. A sequence in which Elisabeth is preparing for a date is probably the most tense in the movie, and it depends on no body horror or physical deformations or anything that isn’t in Moore’s performance. She’s fantastic, and deserves to win the Oscar for this.

It’s too bad that Fargeat doesn’t follow through on everything Moore brings to it. As she’s in the movie less and less, it loses its uniqueness. The climax follows through on the literal bloodbath it promises, and without giving away too much, I’ll say the makeup artists show quite a bit of respect to Beryl Lerman and Michael Morris’s work on The Elephant Man. But the ridiculousness of Lis/Sue’s surroundings comes too close to meeting the ridiculousness of what happens to her, and the line between them is never clear enough for it to be truly effective. It needs a bigger moment of catharsis. Think the ending of Rose Glass’s Saint Maud, which examines this sort of degradation in a way that The Substance fumbles. Still, I must admit I take some joy in this being the first Oscar-nominated movie in which… well, see for yourself. 

** 1/2 out of ****