Bring Back The Dead contains minor surprises. For starters, it isn’t content with merely delivering jump scares, but does contain some smarts as well – which is more than you can say about most local horror films.
The film revolves around a mother, Jia En (Jessica Liu), who is mourning the loss of her son from a car accident. Reeling from the tragedy and unable to let go of her grief, she decides to employ extreme measures to be reunited with her son’s spirit, seeking the aid of a medium to bring his spirit back into her home. A string of strange events start happening in her house, and she soon realises that she may have gotten more than she bargained for.
In most great supernatural films of the genre, the horror doesn’t merely exist as a tool to make you jump in fright, but also as a metaphorical way to develop a deeper understanding of its characters. The Babadook, which is last year’s best horror film, understood this. Bring Back The Dead tries to accomplish this by setting up a similar premise – the spirit that haunts Jia En’s home is, metaphorically speaking, a manifestation of her grief and inability to let go.
That said, while the film’s premise sounds ripe with potential, its execution fails to live up to it. One of my quibbles with the film is that it looks almost too pretty to be a horror film – it’s too sterile and too clean-looking, and even some of the supposedly scary scenes look… boring. When the ghastly apparition appears for the first time in the film, I was too distracted by how generic-looking it was to be truly terrified of it. To be fair, some of the film’s scenes did scare my pants off, but the film comes across wildly uneven in this regard. One scene that had me scratching my head involved the malicious spirit vandalising Jia En’s house walls with strange crayon drawings – was this supposed to hint at the spirit’s evil or chaotic nature? Because that scene feels way too tame to achieve that impact.
Bring Back The Dead tries to balance high tension with character-driven drama – a difficult task, to be sure – and it suffers from weird pacing issues as a result. It gets off to a very, very slow start, trying to establish Jia En’s close relationship with her son, one could assume for the purpose of making the loss of her son more profoundly felt with the audience. But the scenes they share are too brief to achieve this effect, and the one incident that could have the most impact – the car accident itself – ends up being almost completely elided in the film. Bring Back The Dead could have certainly been leaner and more forceful if it had picked up from the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.
And while Lee tries to lend some gravitas to the film’s horror by giving it more context, does it really matter when the horror stops being horrific? Large stretches of the film’s middle segment were, despite the supernatural mishaps, simply a snooze-fest. Fortunately, things picked up in the final act when suspense was ramped up with a stunning twist.
One can and should laud Lee Thean-Jeen for his ambition in emphasising the human dimension of a horror film, one that tries to plumb the depths of its main character, instead of serving up another generic genre film that treats its characters as props. The cast is also pretty solid, with Liu proving versatile in a role that requires fluid changes of emotions (from bliss to anger to depression to terror). It’s just a pity that the human lessons that the film tries to convey aren’t particularly well-served by its haphazard and rushed ending, and the metaphorical aspect of its horror is undermined by how un-horrific the film is. Bring Back The Dead is very much about contending with trauma and learning to let go of the past, and in that case we’ll take a cue from it and put it behind us.
Summary: Unevenly paced and haphazardly concluded, the film is fortunately buoyed by strong performances.
RATING: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Raymond Tan