Horror movies are hot right now, which is a double-edged sword for devotees. There are dozens of titles available to consume every week, which means there are many pretenders to the throne, many cynical throwaways. True horror admirers are after bigger game than diversion: they want the movie that hurts because it means something.

Good news: Danny and Michael Philippou are rapidly establishing themselves as practitioners of that kind of horror movie.

Their breakout “Talk to Me” was lonely and atmospheric, a movie that gradually shed its fun high concept premise to revel in a fierce and free-associational aura of guilt and longing and loss. Their follow-up, “Bring Her Back,” finds the duo doubling down. “Talk to Me” ended in hell, which is the new film’s launching pad.

In a suburb of the Australian city of Adelaide, teenager Andy (Billy Barratt) watches out for his younger step sister, Piper (Sora Wong), who is legally blind, though she can discern colors and shapes. Her eyes have a lost look to them, which opens her up to teasing by her classmates. Poignantly, Andy lies to Piper about the responses of other children to her presence, while Piper even more poignantly knows that he’s lying.

The Philippous establish this relationship with a swift confidence that shouldn’t be overlooked. Andy and Piper are likable and convincing movie children, as the teens of “Talk to Me” were. They are neither too mawkish nor too sassy, in the tradition of the teens of modern slasher movies who talk like middle-aged arts columnists. They are people, in other words, and the issue of Piper’s blindness is handled with sensitivity, without resorting to condescension.

Andy and Piper’s father dies, under circumstances that are never really parsed for the audience, and they are sent to live with a foster mother, Laura (Sally Hawkins). She seems to be a dotty kook, with communes and music festivals in her past, who now lives in an ongoing state of fuzzy sweaters and bedhead. That’s misdirection, of course, and Hawkins, cannily cast against type, goes as deep into her character here as she has in the roles that she’s played for masters like Mike Leigh. Her Laura is not a carnival monster, easy to shrug off. She’s a terrifyingly pitiful, grubby, yet cunning person, who has been destroyed by grief and who, in turn, destroys in grief’s name.

Laura’s home, where most of “Bring Her Back” is set, is a mixture of coziness and menace, of domestic textures that blend “real life” with psychedelic folk horror. It’s a cabin outside of the city among the woods, realistically claustrophobic in a way that homes for working people aren’t usually allowed to be in movies anymore, with a creepy padlocked shed and a pool that’s in the shape of a triangle.

Of the horrible sights that the Philippous spring across the running time of “Bring Her Back,” and several are quite horrible, that triangular pool might be the simplest and eeriest— a resonant blend of the banal and uncanny. As a child, did you ever go swimming and pretend that the pool was a portal to another dimension? The pool in this movie courts those types of connotations. It seems to offer the opportunity for one to swim to hell, or dip down for a baptism and arise as a monster.

The supernatural competes for our attention with a plot that, in a different context, might have served as the springboard for a plucky indie about an unconventional family forging together under duress. Laura is reeling from grief as well, having lost her 12-year-old daughter in that insane swimming pool, and her interest in Piper is suspect.

We’re not idiots. We’ve seen occult-themed films before and we’ve noticed this movie’s title. But the Philippous, who aren’t idiots either, tease us with the unspoken obviousness of the premise for a long while, stringing us along with Laura’s machinations and animal need.

Laura’s grief is in conflict with that felt by Andy and Piper, and her unbridled selfish hunger also embodies a child’s nightmare projection of what might happen if they ever lost their parents and were forced to live somewhere else. The Philippous are working in the realm of a fairy tale, which they bring into the modern day and cross-pollinate with movies like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Don’t Look Now.”

“Don’t Look Now” was about a child lost in the water, mourned by her parents, who were left living in a labyrinthine city of endless canals and rain. The Philippous conjure a similar water world here, a slipstream of incomprehensible agony. They work in a visceral, stream-of-conscious visual style, with many hard and seemingly intuitive close-ups that suggest multiple planes of awareness. There’s the pool, and the rain, and many images are blurred by smeary glass surfaces and earth and tears and blood, suggesting that we are glancing directly at distorted mindscapes, particularly that of Laura.

In a singularly arresting image, Laura communicates with her other foster child, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), by tracing a bloody circle up and down the length of a wet glass door as he ponders that swimming pool. He is mute and clearly shackled by her abuse, and he seems to be contemplating the release of death, which she prevents with a kind of suffocating empathy. We fear her reducing Piper to the same state of supernatural Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. “Bring Her Back” offers a metaphor for manipulation and child abuse, spurred by the abuser’s own profound damage, that’s only thinly veiled by occult hugger-mugger.

This might be the most pitiless horror movie that I’ve seen since “The Outwaters,” which at least offered the catharsis of unhinged surrealism. The Philippous keep us divided uncomfortably between the real world and an otherworld. They aren’t offering an either/or dichotomy between human evil and the demonic, but suggesting that these elements are one and the same. The “rules” of this movie are withheld from us.

We’re not allowed to enjoy the mechanics of a thriller here, exactly. There are no puzzles to solve, no sense of give and take between prey and predator. Andy and Laura are in conflict over Piper, and he loses to her over and over, as Laura gaslights him with escalating brutality. Even “Rosemary’s Baby” offered the pleasures of dark comedy, but the Philippous sustain the dread that comes with grief and abuse.

The Philippous are a rarity: empathetic directors, capable of tethering you to their characters in a fashion that’s virtually unheard of in modern horror movies, who are also willing to hit hard. They are humanists who respect the cleansing feral heartlessness of true horror. The children here aren’t treated with kid gloves, and, as Oliver descends further into a state of damnation, “Bring Her Back” achieves the sense of godlessness that made Stephen King’s novel “Pet Sematary” so unforgettably disturbing, a quality that no movies bearing that actual title have ever begun to approximate.

There’s more grief and vengeance in Jack Maclean’s “Tornado,” in which an eponymously named samurai (Koki) tangles with bandits led by Tim Roth somewhere in the vast British Isles.

The East-West rhyming between samurai and cowboy movies is promising, the visuals are sharp and pleasing, and the action is delivered with stylish snap. Koki, Roth, and Takehiro Hira, as Tornado’s father, are all dashing as soldiers haunted by loss. You can do much worse in theaters.

It’s awfully academic, though, as the script is self-consciously underwritten. It’s so interested in being iconic, festooned as it is with symbols and poses, that it’s barely a movie. “Tornado” is pretty without being dramatic. There’s no blood in its veins.

“Bring Her Back” is just the opposite, and it has plenty of blood to go around.

“Bring Her Back” and “Tornado” are both playing in theaters.