I'm not a great one for horror films, but I was intrigued by what I'd heard of Bring Her Back. So I went to see it while I was in Shrewsbury.
I'd read enough reviews to know when the goriest scenes were coming and to know something about the ending. But really it's not a horror film so much as a film about grief and people's extreme reactions to it.
Sally Hawkins' performance as a deranged counsellor is simply extraordinary, and it's only the widespread sniffyness about genre films that makes me fear it won't win her the awards she deserves. Paddington is lucky he didn't run into her in this guise.
Bring Her Back has a small cast, and the other three leads were very young. In her first film, 14-year-old Sora Wong gives a spirited performance, and you hope 12-year-old Jonah Wren Phillips enjoyed playing a possessed child as much as he appeared to have done in all the interviews.
Billy Barratt, who is now 17, was in many ways the heart of the film. He won an Emmy for his lead performance in the BBC film Responsible Child when he was 12, and I can report that he retains something of the aura of goodness and kindness he had in that role. No wonder directors want to make the characters he plays suffer.
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