Bring Her Back (2025) Ending Explained
- Rob Binns
- Jun 9
- 8 min read
This Bring Her Back ending explainer contains major spoilers for Bring Her Back (2025).
Whew. Anyone else just feel hollowed out and slapped around after seeing Bring Her Back?
I can’t remember the last time I felt so horribly, harrowingly immersed in a film from front to back. If Michael and Danny Philippou’s previous big-screen effort, Talk to Me (2022), didn’t pull any punches, Bring Her Back is on a whole new level – and it’s a wild ride.
That said, I was so sure we wouldn’t get a happy ending – especially after the film takes some big swings in terms of who it kills off, and how. But, unbelievably, we did – yet if you’re like me, the ending of Bring Her Back will still have left you with some lingering questions.
So read on as we explain the ending of Bring Her Back.
What happened? Who was Ollie, and what was his role in Laura’s plan to resurrect her months-dead daughter Cathy? Did Piper survive, or did the ritual come to completion? Read on – we're answering all your questions about how Bring Her Back ends below.
What Happens at the End of Bring Her Back?
The ending of Bring Her Back sees Laura (Sally Hawkins) attempting to complete the ritual to resurrect her dead daughter Cathy (Mischa Heywood) by murdering Piper (Sora Wong).
To do this, she has to kill Piper by drowning her in the house’s swimming pool – in the same place, and via the same means, as Cathy died. And, for a moment, it looks as though she has succeeded, as Piper’s struggles begin to weaken. Then, however, Piper finds her last reserves of energy, clawing Laura’s face from beneath the water to yell a single word, the one that ends up saving her: Mommy.
This is a throwback to earlier in the film, when Laura says she’d do anything to hear her daughter call her “Mommy” again. Knowing this – if not consciously, then perhaps at a deep, subconscious level – Piper calls her that word, which causes something in Laura to snap and relent. Wracked with guilt, and surely already traumatised by her own actions thus far – which include killing Andy (Billy Barratt) and social worker Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton), not to mention kidnapping and abusing local boy Connor Bird (Jonah Wren Phillips) – Laura releases Piper, who manages to find her way to safety.
At this stage, a couple more things happen – but to understand them, we first need to get a handle on who (or what) the Ollie/Connor thing was in Bring Her Back.
Bring Her Back Ending Explained: Who Was Ollie?
“Ollie”, as we see him in the film, is a strange, mute boy living with Laura. Like the kid in Speak No Evil (2024), however – which I’d also recommend – we learn the “selective mutism” Laura labels his condition as is the result of something far, far more sinister.
That’s because “Ollie” is actually a local boy named Connor Bird, who was kidnapped less than two weeks prior. (Laura then renames him “Ollie”, the name of her real nephew. This is also why, when the blind Piper asks Laura what Ollie/Connor’s hair looks like at the start of the film, she replies “red and curly”. This initially comes across as a silly joke, but it’s actually a reference to the hair Laura’s real nephew Ollie had: red and curly.)
The Ollie we see doesn’t have red and curly hair, because he’s not Ollie – Laura, after kidnapping Connor, shaved his flowing locks off and now passes him off to Andy and Piper as another one of her foster children. But why?
Well, Laura is part of a cult, and one of the cult’s abilities is, apparently, to revive people who have recently died. They believe that, after someone passes away, their essence stays in their body for several months. (This is also foreshadowed in a harrowing early scene at Andy’s father’s funeral, when Laura tells him as much – as well as in snippets of the ritual we’re shown at the beginning of the film, and throughout via a video recording.)
The reason Laura needs “Ollie” is that the mechanics of the ritual involve some kind of demonic force. To successfully perform the process of bringing Cathy back to life – or rather, transplanting her spirit or soul into a new person (Piper) – the demon requires a kind of living conduit. This is Ollie. At some point before the film begins, Laura has already started this ritual by implanting Ollie with the demonic force. This is why Ollie can’t speak, and why he exhibits increasingly strange behaviours as the film progresses: he’s not really himself.
There appears to be some kind of gestation period for the demon, though. It takes time for the demon to completely take control of Connor and get to the stage when it’s ready to complete the process. During this time, it must be kept within a kind of ritualistic circle, which is signified by a wide circle of white paint Laura has set up around the house. If not, the process begins to revert, with Ollie returning to his former self.
We get a glimpse of this when, after Andy gives Ollie some fruit, the latter instead begins eating the knife. In an attempt to get Ollie to the hospital, Andy drags him over the line – whereupon an intense physical reaction begins to take place in Ollie. He starts having a seizure, and something within his stomach begins to churn and ripple. After Laura arrives home and brings Ollie back inside (and across the white line), we later see him panicking, after semblings of his old self begin to stir again. Laura suppresses this: stopping Ollie’s reversion back to Connor and allowing that demonic incubation period to restart.
Towards the end of the film, Ollie’s conversion is complete. This is when we see him enter the shed where Laura has been keeping Cathy’s corpse in the freezer. As he begins feasting on her, tearing into her frozen body with his teeth, we know from an earlier insight into the ritual that this is how Cathy’s essence is transferred into the demon.
The demon is, essentially, like a middleman: ‘picking up’ the soul from the dead individual, and ‘dropping it off’ at the intended vessel – in this case, Piper. However, the person that is the soul’s target destination must be dead (and, presumably, have met the same end as the person from which the soul originates) to ‘close the loop’ of the ritual.
After Ollie is done with Cathy’s corpse, we see him make his way over to the pool, ready to transfer the soul to Piper after Laura kills her. His stomach is now bloated and distended, presumably with the weight of the burden he now carries. Ollie’s physical change is, by now, complete – what began as a red, birthmark-looking crescent around his eye is now complemented by feverish, blood-red eyes and a…well, demonic visage.
However, as we see – and as I outlined above – the ritual fails. So what happens to Ollie?
Bring Her Back Ending: Does Piper Survive?
I mentioned earlier that, after the ritual fails, a couple more key things happen.
Firstly, as Piper attempts to get away through the shed, Ollie pursues her and attempts to bite her. This is because he is still carrying Cathy’s soul, and – despite Laura giving up her attempts to complete the ritual – is still possessed by the compulsion to disgorge it onto its intended victim.
Piper, however, gets away.
Seeing her make her way to the help now arriving in droves, whatever force Laura’s machinations have thrust on Ollie seems to sense defeat. As the corruptive force begins to flicker and wane in that moment, Ollie sees a missing-person flyer (the same one Andy brought with him when he arrived with Wendy, attempting to rescue Piper) on the ground.
Seeing an image of his real self, something – perhaps the same benevolent force that compels Piper to shriek “Mother” when she’s mere seconds from death – ignites within Ollie/Connor, and he steps over the white line. He’s later found, alive, by authorities, and manages, when asked, to state his name – Connor. This suggests that the process – which may well have killed him had the ritual come to fruition – has reversed, and he is once again the boy who went missing only days ago. It's a good moment, and essentially means that, despite Andy's death – and his failure in his attempt to save Piper from Laura – he still managed to succeed, if somewhat indirectly, in aiding Connor's successful rescue.
The second thing that happens is that Laura retrieves Cathy’s corpse, and begins to cradle her in the pool as the authorities arrive. She also does one more thing: thrusting her arm – the same one bitten by Ollie/Connor earlier in the evening, as the demonic change began to come to full fruition – towards her dead daughter.
This, presumably, is driven by the desperate notion that, when Ollie bit her earlier, he was able to convey some kind of spare life force – and that Laura may be able to use some of this to imbue her deceased daughter with some final, perverse shot at life. It fails.
Finally, we see Piper being transported to safety, watching a plane ascend into the night sky. This is a reference to earlier in the film, when Andy – trying, good-naturedly, to console his stepsister after their father dies – references a passing plane, saying that it was their father’s spirit making its way to heaven. Piper’s attention to the plane – the way she looks up at it sadly – proves definitively that the ritual did not come to completion.
Piper is not Cathy, she does survive – and, to be honest, I think that’s all we can hope for in terms of a happy ending!
What is Bring Her Back About?
Bring Her Back is about grief – about the people left behind when a loved one passes away, and the sometimes horrific changes and events wrought in that aftermath.
Specifically, Bring Her Back is about the lengths a bereaved person will go while in the depths of that elemental force we call grief – and the acts they may be capable of committing to give that person another shot at life. It’s a theme also explored by films such as The Woman in the Yard (2025), Anything for Jackson (2020), It Feeds (2025), and Stephen King’s Pet Sematary – and is clearly motivated by deeply personal motivations on the directors’ behalf, who dedicated the film to a family friend, Harley Wallace (2001 – 2024).
Yet, as the Philippou brothers also remind us through the atrocities Laura perpetrates (ostensibly in the name of her daughter Cathy) after someone we love leaves us, it’s no longer them that suffer; it’s us, the ones left behind.
The acts Laura commits in her spiralling depravity are a way of reminding us of the inherent selfishness of grief – and how its potent, propulsive force, if not managed, can cause us to lose not only our loved ones, but ourselves.
Did you like the ending of Bring Her Back? Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments! Oh, and if you're still in the mood for more horror after that one, you'll find plenty of it in this guide to every kill in the Final Destination franchise ranked.