Ever since watching Hereditary on a plane in 2018, I’ve been chasing that same stretch of stunned silence it left me with.

Despite anything but ideal viewing conditions — droning engines and a stranger’s head drooping onto my shoulder — I was left utterly speechless and queasy for the remainder of that long-haul flight.

For many of us, the traditional God-fearing, devil-driven horror film no longer cuts it. What we crave is psychological terror.

Bring Her Back delivers precisely that.

I sensed it from the very first moment we’re confronted with Sally Hawkins’ unhinged stare as she scrutinises the face of her new partially sighted foster child Piper (Sora Wong). It sets the stomach churning immediately; something is deeply, unmistakably wrong.

It soon emerges that ex-social worker Laura (Hawkins) has recently lost her own vision-impaired child, and her disturbing fixation on Piper lands with a sickening thud.

Hawkins’ comic timing is razor-sharp. She wasted no time pressuring Piper’s stepbrother Andy (Billy Barratt) into revealing details about his father, while simultaneously launching a gaslighting campaign that at one point stoops to deploying her own urine.

Having rifled through his phone, she purrs with an unsettling softness, “I’m a counsellor'” — complete with art-teacher beads and entirely unironic bayonet reading glasses.

It is a masterfully nuanced performance from Hawkins. One is left almost physically recoiling, torn between sympathy and revulsion as Laura is driven to the brink of psychosis by a wall of grief she simply cannot scale.

Barratt, a refreshingly teenager-looking teenager, braces and all, is the making of this film. His wide watery eyes instantly raise the stakes.

We are on Andy’s side and we need him to live.

While Danny and Michael Philippou excel at creating ‘unsettling’ moments, the film suffers from two notable weaknesses. The first is the tired miscommunication, or rather, under-communication storyline.

It’s a straightforward and uninspired method to secure audience investment – having them mentally screaming ‘just listen to your brother!’

This immediate frustration eclipses any subtle, meticulously crafted tension.

The second weakness is that the Philippou brothers deploy every fundamental Freudian horror trope available to them. Subtlety doesn’t always hold inherent value.

Nevertheless, when you’re tackling cannibalism, child abuse, parent loss, child loss, abuse of power, body horror, drowning, ghosts and something resembling exorcism, it can begin to feel like we’re throwing everything at the wall.

That said, during one scene when one of the many abused children in the film starts to eat his own flesh and begins peeling off his forearm like a snap-on bracelet – I glanced round to find the entire room, hands covering mouths, hunched forwards in their seats.

Depicting something so disturbing while maintaining audience attention, without provoking laughter, is an achievement.

My friend later confessed that he kept his eyes firmly shut throughout the entire second half of the film because he “just couldn’t do it.”

I watched him close his eyes and attempt to block out the relentless on-screen torment at the moment a child uses a fruit knife like a saw, creating a cleft in his lip.

Give this film a wide berth if you are feeling even remotely sensitive. However, if you’re seeking a thoroughly unsettling experience within a modest run time of an hour and a half – get watching now.