Bring Her Back

After the death of their father Phil — physically abusive toward Andy and subtly favoring his blind stepsister Piper — the two children are placed with a foster mother named Laura, who lives in a quiet suburban house with a pool and a non-verbal boy she calls Oliver. Piper, who relies on texture, tone, and sound, warms quickly to Laura and to Oliver. Andy is uneasy from the start: Laura keeps a locked garden shed she will not let them near; Oliver seems traumatized and malnourished, gnawing on objects and eventually on his own skin; and Laura's behavior whiplashes between nurturing and something else entirely, especially around the backyard pool where her daughter Cathy drowned. Oliver is not Oliver — he is Connor Bird, a local missing child Laura abducted. Using a ritual glimpsed early in the film on grainy VHS footage, she has turned Connor into a demon-possessed vessel by feeding him the hair and flesh of Cathy's corpse, which she has kept frozen in the locked garden shed. Laura's plan requires three components: Cathy's preserved body, Connor as the demon-ridden host who will consume and then regurgitate Cathy's remains, and a sacrificial child drowned in the same pool under the same storm conditions as Cathy's death — a role she has chosen for Piper. The demon eats the dead girl into the host; the host vomits her into the freshly drowned replacement body; Cathy is resurrected. Andy begins piecing this together and Laura works systematically to neutralize him. He hallucinates his dead father Phil in the shower, who tells him she will die in the rain — a warning about Piper and the pool. The hallucination and a concussive fall make Andy look unstable to adults. Laura drugs him, makes him believe he has wet himself, and one night hits Piper in the face while she sleeps, then convinces the blind girl that Andy did it, leaving Piper with a black eye and a fracture in her trust toward her brother. The turning point arrives when Andy visits the foster agency and recognizes Connor Bird on a missing child poster. He convinces his caseworker Wendy to accompany him to the house. Laura intercepts a voicemail Andy left Piper before they arrive and frantically scrubs ritual evidence. During the visit Wendy notices blood on Laura's arm. Laura snaps and lays out her plan in full — the resurrection, Cathy, the ritual, all of it. Wendy and Andy go to the shed and open the door: Connor is inside, grotesquely swollen, crouched over Cathy's partially consumed corpse and actively gnawing on her remains, his mouth and clothes stained, barely a child anymore. Laura jumps into her car and accelerates into the driveway at speed. Wendy is killed instantly by the impact. Andy is badly injured but alive; Laura drags him to a rain-soaked patch of ground and forces his face down into a muddy puddle, drowning him in brutal, unhurried fashion — the boy who was right about everything, killed by the person who was supposed to protect him, face-down in the mud. Laura then drives to collect Piper from goalball practice as though nothing has happened. She brings Piper home and tells her Andy is unstable and not doing well. Connor, corrupted by the demon and by what he has eaten, is deployed as bait: after consuming some of Andy's flesh he speaks in Andy's voice to draw Piper close, mimicking her brother's cadences with enough accuracy to unsettle her. But Piper's sensitivity to texture and detail catches something wrong — the shape of his skull, the texture of his hair not matching what Laura had described. She locks herself in the bathroom. In the dark and the quiet she reaches out and finds Andy's body: cold, still, identifiable by the braces on his teeth. That tactile recognition is the film's most devastating moment. She knows. In the chaos of panicking and disoriented flight, Piper knocks herself unconscious. Laura drags her outside into a storm — recreating the exact conditions of Cathy's death — and sets up the ritual around the pool. She pulls Piper into the water and holds her under, fully committed, the rain coming down the way it did the night Cathy drowned. From underwater the camera watches Piper thrash and slow. Then, surfacing with the last air she has, Piper screams one word: Mom. Laura has spent years aching to hear Cathy call her that again. The word from Piper's mouth — sincere, terrified, not performed — cracks something open. The maternal instinct that grief had twisted into monstrosity reasserts itself for one second. Laura releases her. Piper scrambles out of the pool and flees the property blind and disoriented, reaching the road where she is picked up — in some versions by her goalball coach, who had already come to check on her after seeing her black eye. Connor gives chase but steps outside the white boundary circle that defines the ritual space. The instant he crosses it the demon's hold breaks. He collapses to the ground, weeping, his own consciousness flooding back into his body. The ritual is broken: no sacrificial death, no completed transfer, no resurrection. Police arrive to find Connor alive and identified, and Laura lying in the pool cradling Cathy's mutilated remains and sobbing. The dead stay dead. Piper survives not because an adult saves her but because she says the one word that could reach what remained of Laura's humanity. Andy, Wendy, Phil, and Cathy are gone. What is left is the wreckage of what grief becomes when it is given enough time and no one intervenes.