>>213568678Bring Her Back isn't perfect, it has flaws like the heavily foreshadowed plot devices and typical dumb-moment contrivances to move forward the plot, and a cheap dead daughter motif.
It's best asset is obviously the fractured, anguished, and deeply emotionally touching performance from Sally Hawkins, but it's also got some of the best child acting I've ever seen. The Make-up and expressions of the possessed child was phenomenal. The gore and brutality was unsettling but not schlocky buzzsaw slop. The narrative didn't have pretensions on sprawling/literary like Weapons, so its characters had time to breathe and vent their trauma and pathos.
It's smaller scale, and so the set of Laura's house looks way more lived in, the black conjuration rites more compellingly occult in tandem with the ritual snuff films. It never felt like it relied on cheap Scooby-Doo mystery gimmicks like the kids waving their arms or the floating dream AR15.
I suppose I should give Weapons the benefit of the doubt in that I obviously came in with the wrong expectation. It's sat squarely in the zone of The Black Phone and Doctor Sleep, when it comes to the sort of pulpy, harmless heroes-prevail monster horror. I expected something more chilling and thought-provoking given the thematic evocativeness of the tile and imagery.
This is gonna sound retarded, but the problem for me is that horror, and the viscerality of it, how it latches into your mind and grates at your nerves, is almost always a reflection of the underlying realism, whether that's in the cheese-grated skin and leaking arteries of something like Terrifier, or the tape-artefacts and muffled noises of the snuff films in Sinister. A small, and simply paced film with less characters like Bring Her Back provides a good ground for the film's psychologically-dominated horror to thrive.
Weapons meanwhile was interesting to watch unfold, but uninteresting to see conclude.
