Film reviews: Bring Her Back | Late Shift | Savages
Sally Hawkins is terrifying in gothic horror Bring Her Back, writes Alistair Harkness
Building on the promise of their breakthrough horror film Talk to Me, Australian directors Danny and Michael Philippou kick things up several notches with Bring Her Back, a gnarly slice of contemporary gothic horror featuring a terrifying performance by Sally Hawkins.
Riffing on her normally kooky demeanour, Hawkins digs deep to play Laura, a grieving foster mother who takes in the visually impaired Piper (Sora Wong) and her older half-brother Andy (Billy Barratt) when Andy’s father dies suddenly and horrifically. Laura’s still raw with grief from the loss of her own blind daughter in a tragic accident, but her former job as a therapist means she’s well placed to present herself as a source of salvation for Piper without raising red flags, something the Philippou brothers milk for all its worth as Andy starts to fear for the safety of both his sister and their strange new adoptive brother Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips).
Although Oliver does wince-inducing things with cats, melons and knives, the palpable air of dread emanating from Laura as she gaslights her new charges adds a psychological dimension that’s just as intense.
There’s an overarching mythology at play here too, one parsed out in grainy video clips of cult-like rituals that start coming together in the film’s final third. But it’s really Hawkins’ performance that makes this so unnerving. Decked out in an array of non-threatening knitwear, Hawkins is good at making Laura seem just off-kilter enough that when the extremes of despair to which grief has driven her are finally revealed, she elicits almost as much pity as fear.
There’s more nerve-wracking tension in Late Shift, a precision engineered medical procedural following a nurse over the course of a particularly trying evening shift in a Swiss hospital. Played by the brilliant German actor Leonie Benesch (The Teachers’ Lounge), this is the preternaturally composed Floria who, nevertheless, finds herself stretched to breaking point on an understaffed surgical ward rapidly filling up with difficult patients. Although writer/director Petra Volpe’s workplace drama is schematically designed to highlight the often thankless plight of the nursing profession, both she and Benesch imbue it with enough visual and character-driven grace notes that it avoids preachiness.
Sticking with Switzerland, animation maverick Claude Barras (My Life as a Courgette) returns with Savages, another French language stop-motion marvel dealing with tricky themes in an accessible way. Set in Borneo, it revolves around a young girl with indigenous heritage who’s simultaneously awakened to the plight of her ancestors and the consequences of deforestation when she witnesses government contractors orphan a baby orangutang as they clear the land for a palm oil plantation.
As she takes care of the primate, Barras deepens and widens the scope of the film with family conflict and digs at corporate greenwashing, but the animation is so deft and delightful, and the story so devoid of sentimentality, he manages to draw you into the high-stakes story without resorting to amped-up action and exhausting set-pieces.
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