Give It Back to Me: Terror Cut with a Knife (****)

They've done it again. A few years ago, the Philippou brothers, two angelic Australians with the faces of redeemed (or not so redeemed) ex-convicts, shocked darkness itself with a quintessentially dark film. Talk to Me , inspired by the stupid and gratuitous cruelty of viral challenges, was a teen film, but something more. It was also a leap into the void that briefly held the viewer's breath, living up to Lovecraft's saying: "I can't even hint at what it was like, because it was a composite of all that is impure, terrifying, unwanted, abnormal, and detestable." Now, taking a step further and with two added grams of supervening immaturity, the idea is to insist on and repurpose a commonplace from the familiar realm of horror (before it was a child's Ouija board, now the possibility of bringing a loved one back from the dead) into a genuine eye-sore. It sounds tremendous, perhaps exaggerated, just wait until you see the knife scene.

Two siblings—he a teenager, she still a child—are left alone in this world that, truth be told, doesn't make much sense. Orphanhood, as you know, always generated tender feelings and murky thoughts. Social services place them with a seemingly adorable woman. The fact that the woman in question is played by Sally Hawkins is both a guarantee and a warning. This actress's ability to modulate, in a split second, a gesture that goes from the deepest tenderness to the most terrifying chaos is difficult to compare with anything that isn't terrible, very terrible. Soon, the pieces begin to no longer fit together. A child (another, a third) wanders around the new house with a vacant expression. But didn't the woman live alone? And that strange Russian video that Hawkins' character watches over and over again—what exactly is it? What does it mean? But does VHS still exist?

The directors lay their arguments out on the table, or rather, on the viewer's most intimate fears, letting them shape their own universe of fear, loneliness, and sadness. What emerges from the screen is a film that, as it progresses, thickens in the heart, until an enveloping, thick, and simply unbreathable sensation takes over every corner of your gaze. Give It Back to Me (thus, in the urgent imperative) is a film that speaks to the injustice of pain, the absurdity of suffering, the unbearable loss of a loved one. But, above all, it's a film built on faith in the image, in the cinematic gesture, to raise a disturbing, terrifying, and inescapable world. The Philippou brothers have done it again. The year was waiting for their horror film, and now they have it. A real pleasure for a few sleepless nights. And the knife scene, for God's sake.

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Director : Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou. Cast : Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips. Running time : 99 minutes. Nationality : Australia.