Talk to Me (2023)
dir. Danny & Michael Philippou
Rated: R
image: ©2023 A24
Talk to Me, the nasty, visceral horror film out of Australia, offers up plenty of themes for dissection, but there’s something to be said for simply getting caught up in its wicked charms. Twin brother directing team Danny and Michael Philippou, who are the creative minds behind the YouTube channel RackaRacka, have made a chilling feature film debut in Talk to Me. If you can handle its gruesome sensibility, their film delivers horrific imagery and a scare around every corner.
The Philippous waste no time in getting our adrenaline pumping. In the introductory sequence, we see a young man frantically searching for his brother at a boisterous house party. He has to break down a bedroom door to get to him. As they are walking through the kitchen of the house, the other brother, who appears to be in an almost catatonic state, grabs a knife and stabs his familial rescuer before plunging the knife into his own head.
Next, we meet Mia, a 17-year-old who is mourning her mother on the second anniversary of her death. Her strained relationship with her father means Mia spends a lot of her time with her best friend, Jade, and her surrogate family, Jade’s kid brother Riley and their mother, Sue.
Mia is fascinated by a party game that’s gone viral among their high school peer group via YouTube videos – a likely nod to the Philippous’ roots. After some cajoling, Mia convinces Jade to take her to a party where the game will next be played. Jade begrudgingly allows Riley to tag along.
The game involves a severed, embalmed hand which is encased in plaster. The rules are as follows: light a candle to open the door to the other side to start the game; blow it out to close the door and end it. The person in the hot seat must be fitted with restraints, so they can’t get away when the fun starts. Taking the severed hand in theirs, the lucky participant then says, “Talk to me.”
To the delight of the crowd, the person playing the game usually freaks out because they see something in the room no one else can: a ghost from the spirit realm. The final step is to say the words, “I let you in,” causing an unsettling transformation as the spirit invades the body of the person playing. The other people in the room must ensure that the participant breaks contact with the hand after 90 seconds, lest the sprit take up permanent residence.
All goes well that first night, but Mia is anxious to do it again, so she convinces Jade to host a party at her own house when Sue will be out for the night. When Riley convinces Mia to let him try the game, over the strong objections of Jade, things go terribly wrong. The spirit inside Riley forces the young boy to smash his head again and again into a table, turning his face into a bloody mess. Later, at the hospital, Riley harms himself again as soon as he becomes conscious, smashing the back of his head into the tiled wall.
The Philippous – with a screenplay by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, and based on a concept by Daley Pearson – probably won’t face accusations of being too subtle with their debut big screen shocker. Early in the film, Mia, after picking up Riley from a friend-hang because his sister wouldn’t answer her phone, comes upon a kangaroo that has been struck by a car. In a bit of foreshadowing that walks the line of being blatantly obvious, the kangaroo lays there suffering and Riley pleads with Mia to put it out of its misery.
That’s a dilemma Mia will again be faced with at the film’s climax. As on-the-nose and telegraphed as that plot progression might seem, her ultimate decision, as well as a last-minute twist during the picture’s denouement, genuinely took me by surprise, sending me out of the theater with my head spinning.
One of Talk to Me’s charms is in its use of CGI-free, lo-fi makeup effects during the possession scenes to turn each game participant into a rotting, gurgling demon. The film’s makeup team added purple and blue makeup around the mouth and eyes of each game player, in addition to creepy black contact lenses, to invoke the image of a rotting corpse. The actual spirits we see, when not inhabiting a living character, look like something out of the Evil Dead films; the spirits in this film’s universe are bloated, putrid, and disgusting.
As Mia tries to find a way to rescue Riley from his possession, I was struck by how effectively the film brought up my own personal demons (pun completely intended) about the prospect of an eternity of torture. I was raised a Christian, and in the fundamentalist, evangelical Baptist tradition, it was impressed upon me at a very young age that if I didn’t accept the pure gift of love and grace that Jesus offers, I would be forever tortured in hell.
There is not so much as one solitary reference to the Christian faith in Talk to Me. In two truly supernatural passages within it, we see poor Riley, like that suffering kangaroo, being torn apart and unimaginably tortured by evil spirits in their realm. Even though I walked away from religious faith over a decade ago, I am still occasionally hit with a moment of panic that, if I’ve gotten this wrong, my eternal fate might be one of unending suffering. (Then I remember that I was psychologically abused as an adolescent by several churches, and that fairy tales can’t hurt me.)
The sequences featuring Riley’s descent into hell are basically an exact representation of the fever-dream visions that overwhelm my brain in these brief moments of doubt. They couldn’t have possibly known it, but the Philippous knew exactly how to pin me to the wall with fear and dread; their vision rattled me even as I recognized the artistic skill that had gone into causing my distressed reaction.
Mia is the most nuanced character of the ensemble. We can feel how unmoored this girl is, how frozen she is in her own grief. Much of our empathizing with the character is down to Sophie Wilde’s performance as Mia. From her first appearance in the film to her last, Wilde plays Mia as a shattered young woman, precariously close to falling into the abyss at any moment.
The same can’t be said about a few of the other characters in Talk to Me. Australian actor Zoe Terakes is Hayley, the member of Mia and Jade’s cohort who plays master of ceremonies during the haunted parlor game.
(One of my favorite bits of the movie is the lore built around the magical severed hand and how it works; in one scene, a character makes the pronouncement that the hand belonged to a medium, explaining why it can contact the dead.)
Terakes does a fine job with what they’re given, but the character is written as a paper-thin antagonist who’s simply a bit of a dick and otherwise one-dimensional. Similarly, Sue, Jade and Riley’s mother, is a harried single mom who treats her kids as headaches to be endured and not much else. The charming Miranda Otto – probably best known to American audiences as Éowyn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations – saves the character from being completely one note.
Besides what I’m referring to as the hell sequences, the other standout moment in Talk to Me comes as Mia’s dreams are infested by the evil spirits. In the most inventive and disorienting shot of the movie, Mia goes from lying in bed to walking away from it upright as her dream turns into a nightmare. It ends with Mia watching as a ghoul begins sucking on the foot of Jade’s boyfriend, Daniel – who also happens to be Mia’s ex-boyfriend. The creepy factor contained in this bonkers moment must be seen to be believed.
Talk to Me, if you let it in, is a blast. It’s a scary good time that’s sure to make you second guess what’s lurking in the realm that lies beyond our flesh-and-blood plane of reality, if only for a short while.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- If you can handle it, Talk to Me is devilishly effective. There’s also enough going on thematically for you to sink your teeth into to make it a rewarding experience.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The movie sort of equates this mystical party game with other activities teenagers engage in that can be risky, like drinking or drug use. In fact, the embalmed hand could be read as a metaphor for drug use. I was never a part of that scene during my own high school experience, so I enjoyed seeing it portrayed on screen. (I was, in those days, what could most charitably be described as a total L7; the fact that I just used the term L7 probably means I still am one. I’m fine with that.)
- One of the best lines of the movie is when the guy who has come into possession of this hand, who is a person of color, describes it’s origin and use as total “white people shit.”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I initially saw this at SXSW 2023 and really loved it. I cooled on it, but only slightly, on the second viewing with Rae at the Texas Theatre. After 13 years together, I still don’t know what will scare my wife shitless. For that, I apologize.