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SPOILER WARNING: The following article describes some of the most shocking scenes from Bring Her Back in explicit detail. If you have not yet seen the new horror movie or simply cannot stomach such unsettling material, I beg you to proceed with caution.
I believe Danny and Michael Phillippou delivered not just one of the best A24 horror movies yet, but an all-time great A24 movie with 2023’s Talk to Me. With their sophomore effort, Bring Her Back, I believe they have not only achieved one of the best horror movies of the year so far, but one of the most viscerally unsettling films in recent memory.
The new A24 movie stars Billy Barratt and Sora Wong as orphaned siblings Andy and Piper, who are sent to live with a foster mother named Laura (Academy Award nominee Sally Hawkins) who is hiding a sinister, otherworldly secret. The story’s supernatural elements were certainly creepy, but it was when the new 2025 movie became a body horror flick that had me overcome with an uneasiness that I have struggled to shake off since. Anyone who has seen Bring Her Back likely knows exactly which scene I am talking about. Do you dare to relive that moment with me?
The Cantaloupe Scene
For me (and probably most people), the most boundary-pushing moment from Bring Her Back sees Andy attempting to spend time with Laura’s other foster child, the non-speaking Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), by sharing some cantaloupe with him, but makes the mistake of handing him the butcher knife he used to slice the fruit. Just hearing the sound of the young boy biting down on the blade had my adrenaline pumping before the sight of the kid violently cutting through his gums and having his philtrum sliced in half when Andy tries to take the knife back just about sent me through the roof of the theater.
I honestly had to take a few moments to work up the courage to type all of that out because that scene, which also had CinemaBlend’s Eric Eisenberg leaping out of his chair when he saw an extended preview of Bring Her Back, has been haunting me ever since. I tried so hard to get the image of poor Oliver (possessed by a ritualistic demon at this time) self-mutilating his mouth out of my head all that night and all the next day, paralyzed by discomfort each time it trickled back into my memory. Then again, that’s not the only moment that had such an effect on me.
Actually, Any Scene In Which Oliver Eats Had Me In Distress
One aspect of Bring Her Back’s cantaloupe scene that I did not mention before, partially because it is such a challenge for me to revisit, is that Oliver also loses a tooth when Andy tries to take the knife out of his mouth. I was not prepared to see him lose any more teeth, and I was especially not prepared to witness how he loses them, by taking a couple of bites out of Laura’s wooden kitchen counter.
You see, the demon living inside Oliver (whose real name turns out to be Connor, by the way) is part of a resurrection ritual that involves ingesting the corpse and soul of the deceased and regurgitating it into a new vessel. However, it is eager to cure its insatiable appetite in any way possible, driving it to feed on Laura’s chickens and even taking a huge chunk of skin from Oliver’s arm with his remaining teeth, which inspired an audible reaction from myself and most of the people in my theater. However, watching him chomp down on the wooden counter left me especially sick to my stomach.
With These Scenes, Bring Her Back Taps Into A Largely Untouched Brand Of Fear
Seeing a child in peril is never fun for me, even involving a creepy kid I would not want to mess with like the possessed Oliver. However, the film had a more lasting impression on me than anything of that nature I have witnessed before, and I think the secret lies in the teeth.
Dental mutilation is a fear trigger that I did not know I had, or at least to the degree that it affects me, until I saw this movie, which brings the concept into the fold multiple times in the scenes with the cantaloupe and the kitchen counter.
I have seen plenty of horror films in which a character’s teeth suddenly fall out, such as David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar-winning The Substance, but films that show them being violently removed are more rare in my experience, with a harrowing scene from 2016’s pre-Civil War-era biopic, The Birth of a Nation, being the only other I can think of. Quite frankly, by clueing me in to a previously undiscovered degree of my fear threshold, the Phillippou brothers have earned even more respect from this horror fan.
While these indelibly disturbing scenes from Bring Her Back could be seen as exploitative, I do not think I would categorize them as such, because I believe they are important to the unsettling nature of this chilling story. In fact, I believe that with this and Talk to Me, Danny and Michael Phillippou have mastered a brand of horror that is equal parts sickeningly brutal and, most importantly, refreshingly human.