Bring Her Back’s Ending & Occult Ritual Explained (Was It an Angel?)

Bring Her Back is the latest horror movie from Danny and Michael Philippou. Like their debut feature Talk to Me (2022), Bring Her Back examines the horror that is unlocked when wounded souls get lured into making Faustian bargains as a means of escaping their grief. In this case, a motherly caregiver named Laura (Sally Hawkins) is revealed to have deeply twisted intentions to ‘get back’ her daughter she lost, at ungodly expense. That process involves a strange occult ritual that forms the framework of the movie’s occult lore – lore that is, admittedly, largely left up to the viewer’s speculation and imagination.

However, for those who leave Bring Her Back with some big questions in your mind, you’re not alone. Below, you can hopefully find some of the answers you have about the occult rituals at the heart of Bring Her Back and what power they actually held (or not).

What’s The Ritual & How Does It Work?

The ritual that Laura becomes obsessed with recreating comes from Russia and is clearly based in religious occult practices. There is never any concrete translation of the incantation that’s being recited, but the ritual clearly involves a dark three-step process:

1. A “host” body is chosen to be the vessel of some otherworldly spirit. In the film, this role is taken on by “Oliver” (real name Connor Bird), the boy Laura kidnaps and possesses, using the first stage of the ritual.
2. The “host” consumes the body of a dead person who is to be resurrected, thereby containing the lost soul inside it.
3. A third person is chosen to be the sacrifice and is killed in the same exact way as the lost soul. The host then vomits the consumed body into the mouth of the sacrificed person, filling their body with the soul that was originally lost, bringing the dead person back in a new body.

RELATED: Bring Her Back Directors Have Enough Lore For More Movies

Was The Ritual Real?

Laura never gets to finish the ritual on young Piper (Sora Wong), as Piper finally manages to appeal to her maternal instincts by calling her foster mother “mom,” causing Laura to stop drowning her in the pool. However, the opening of Bring Her Back and scenes of Laura consulting the videotapes of the ritual for guidance do seem to suggest that it is very real.

Of course, the entire thematic point of Bring Her Back has little to do with the ritual itself, and more with what it represented: a twisted and morally compromised way for someone to side-step their grief, and all the irrationality involved with wanting to do anything to alleviate that pain. That all said, it’s kind of hard to deny the eerie things that happen during the Andy and Piper’s stay with Larua – particularly when it comes to Oliver…

Was Oliver an Angel? Or A Demon?

The biggest point of debate with Bring Her Back is what, exactly, was possessing Oliver. The film purposely doesn’t commit to any full-on “evil” portrayal of the red-eyed being that is Oliver. He isn’t outwardly nefarious or even that intelligent, and he seems to be docile and controlled by certain incantations of the ritual Laura employs at key moments. The biggest issue with Oliver is the increasingly insatiable hunger that he feels, as he waits to consume the corpse of Laura’s daughter, Cathy, a process that Laura can’t carry out until she finally meets Piper and decides that she is the suitable vessel for Cathy’s resurrection.

So was Oliver actually an angel? The viewer is left to interpret that answer, but Danny and Michael Philippou have weighed in with their directorial views, which seem to lean toward Oliver being some kind of supernatural entity who is neutral, morally speaking, and is more of a tool of higher powers:

“Oliver is not good or bad,” Michael told USA Today. “He’s committing this miracle. He’s bringing back a lost loved one.”

“He’s not there with evil intentions. He’s like a genie in a bottle. You rub the lamp, he’s going to come out.”

Bring Her Back is now in theaters.