At The Movies: Bring Her Back will give you chills, samurai western Tornado makes the cut

BRING HER BACK (R21)

99 minutes, opens on July 17 exclusively at The Projector

★★★★☆

The story: Two step-siblings are ensnared in their foster mum’s diabolical occult ritual.

The film titles of Australian twins Danny and Michael Philippou are malicious invitations.

The “me” of the directing duo’s 2022 breakout debut Talk To Me was an embalmed hand that possessed the adolescents communing with it.

And in Bring Her Back, the guardian is Laura (Sally Hawkins) and the “her” is the dead daughter she intends to revive.

Assigned to live with Laura in her remote cabin beyond the Adelaide suburbs are 17-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and preteen Piper (Sora Wong), who is, as her daughter was, vision-impaired.

Laura already has a catatonic foster son (Jonah Wren Phillips). The boy has a bloated belly, which is strange because sharp utensils and his own flesh are all he seems to eat – both clearly preferable to Vegemite.

Add the mysterious shed behind the pool where the daughter drowned, and the Gothic fairy tale is constantly unsettling.

It becomes positively distressing once you discern Laura’s deranged plan, why she is gaslighting protective big brother Andy to gain control over Piper: Water and circles, the symbols of birth and infinity, are your visual cues.

With just two movies, the Philippous – collaborating under the handle RackaRacka – have gained a following for their original horror creations.

British actress Hawkins (The Shape Of Water, 2017) is sinister in her faux cheeriness, and the three juvenile actors are extraordinary – you so fear for these vulnerable victims.

The bond between Andy and Piper is the most touching. Recently orphaned, they, too, are in bereavement, in a story on the madness of grief that breaks your heart even more than it shocks and rattles.

Hot take: This chiller about abusive adults and shattered families is the mother of childhood nightmares.

TORNADO (NC16)

91 minutes, opens on July 17

★★★☆☆

The story: In 1790s Scotland, the daughter (Koki) of a Japanese puppeteer (Takehiro Hira) steals two sacks of gold from a savage gang. The outlaws are now hunting her down.

The British period drama Tornado grips from the very start, with the eponymous heroine fleeing in desperation across the barren land.

On her heels are the highwaymen. Tim Roth is at his scurviest playing the leader Sugarman, and Little Sugar (Jack Lowden) is his double-crossing son.

The others have names like Kitten (Rory McCann) and Psycho (Dennis Okwera), as well as arrows and knives, and they are unhurried because they know Tornado has nowhere to run.

The circumstances are then explained in a narrative that returns to earlier that fateful day.

Filmed amid the misty moors by Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Poor Things, 2023), the sophomore feature of Scottish writer-director John Maclean is stark and spare, even if it never again equals the opening half-hour’s sustained tension.

It is a chanbara frontier adventure of wayfarers scrabbling for survival, another unique piece of revisionist history after Maclean’s widely acclaimed Slow West (2015) dropped a Scottish lad in the American West.

Tornado’s father is a samurai in spirit and puppeteer by trade. The 16-year-old girl is his bored assistant on their travelling wagon show, not unlike Little Sugar in resenting a controlling patriarch. Hence Tornado’s impulsive theft – she thinks the riches will bring independence, but the consequences are tragic.

Throats are slit and limbs lopped off. The Japanese value of patience and her father’s katana – the cultural heritage she had spurned – become her weapons as she vows slow-burn revenge against her pursuers.

Tornado, the wayward child, turns raging warrior and earns her name.

Hot take: Japanese singer-model Koki cuts a wide swath in a singular swordplay western.