The Philippou brothers’ directorial debut is a freshly original horror that understands the genre’s core purpose: to scare. And scare it does, with flair, wit and buoyancy.
★★★✰✰
2023 has been a somewhat shaky year for horror filmgoers. Swamped by reboots, sequels and prequels, punters have endured the likes of Scream VI and Insidious: The Red Door, in the hope that an original chiller will creep up on them when they’re least expecting, as Barbarian did to audiences last year. Of course, M3GAN (2023) showed that originality is still on the mind of filmmakers, albeit in a sillier slapstick form, and the micro-budgeted, formally-inventive Skinamarink (2023) managed to carve a niche of its own. But a true nerve-stirring, out-and-out, scare-your-socks-off horror, is yet to surface.
That was until Aussie small fry Talk to Me barged through the door at this year’s Sundance, piquing the interest of independent distributing giant A24 and landing sibling director duo Michael and Danny Philippou the opportunity most filmmakers only dream of.
Opening on the pavement of a dark suburban street, with the distant percussive rhythms of South-Australian Drill building in the periphery, a long tracking shot follows a young man as he weaves through the hubbub of a drunken teenage house party to a locked bedroom door. It’s a dextrous statement of intent from DP Aaron McLinsky, establishing a dogged restlessness to which Talk to Me dedicates so much of its pace. But before its audience has even considered reaching for the popcorn, a sudden flurry of ultraviolence slashes through that unbroken frame, quickly and brutally cutting to black.
The relationship that such a disturbing prologue has to the following scene is a mystery, as the story joins Mia (Sophie Wilde), a 17-year old picking up her best friend’s younger brother Riley (Joe Bird). We catch the two in the middle of a high-pitched rendition of South Australian native Sia’s hit ‘Chandelier’ while on a late-night car journey (a proud nod to many of the cast and crew’s neck of the woods). Their happy-go-lucky warbling is soon interrupted by an injured deer in the road, whose pained shrieks cast an uneasy tension over the scene. In this moment the frame lingers on Mia, charting her reaction before cutting to reveal the bloodied doe. It’s an effective method of establishing perspective, one that the film will hold as a central motif, as the ensuing events take place through the eyes and in the mind of Wilde’s struggling teen. Here too Talk to Me begins to impress its thematic schema; the decision between ending the poor creature’s misery or driving on bears significant emotional weight on Mia, for whom today is the anniversary of her mother’s apparent suicide.
Later that evening, in Riley’s family home—now a much-frequented place of comfort following her mother’s passing—Mia persuades Jade (Alexandra Jensen) to sneak out and join a gathering down the road. Riley catches word of his elder sister and Mia’s plans and asks if he can come along too. Their destination is no ordinary drunken assembly of teenagers—ghostly possession is the cocktail of choice. One of the other teens has somehow acquired a ceramic hand, said to be severed from a medium who could talk to the dead. Following a recent Snapchat trend in the local area, the characters try their hand at reaching the beyond, holding the trinket and calling out the eponymous phrase “talk to me”. Pupils dilate and heads rock back as the participant lets a spirit of the dead enter their body, inducing a euphoric high. Mia seems all too keen to get involved, but she is warned that possessions must only last up to 90 seconds; any more would pose the risk of being consumed by a spirit of the dead. An odd choice for Friday night entertainment, but one Mia thoroughly enjoys. Jade and Riley, however, are less inclined and refuse the phantom high.
Here, Talk To Me feels poised and ready to make an incisive comment on Gen-Z’s fancying of internet-trend virality, a central sentiment with which its admittedly daft-sounding plot can hold a contemporaneous societal connection. Riley’s later use of a YouTube video to help him sleep after being spooked out by the evening’s events takes this idea further to comment on young people’s reliance on the internet, whilst comically paying homage to the director duo’s internet video roots.
It’s not long until the trio is back with the hand again, and in a heady montage of various euphoric possessions, a parallel to teen drug addiction becomes more and more conspicuous. Each trip with the dead is accompanied by an audience of mobile phone camera torches, the youngsters relishing in sharing some of the bizarre and funny possession episodes online. The group’s teenage levity quickly fades when one of the possessed begins talking to Mia in the voice of her mother, triggering a series of terrifying consequences.
The film’s thematic mix of grief, addiction and peer pressure, which had been so rivetingly set-up in the first act, rears its ugly head in the second, accompanied by white-knuckle horror and disgustingly squelchy gore. The latter, thanks to some fantastic practical effect work, looks as though it has arrived from Sam Raimi’s own bloody register. At its best, Talk to Me marries each of these elements with adept synchronicity, amalgamating into incredible moments of pure terror, the likes of which linger long after you leave the cinema.
Wilde’s kinetic performance honours the film’s emotional baggage and attempts to ground the looser final act, within which the plot begins to lose sight of its more earthly thematic concerns. The film’s internet-geared societal incision, its compelling exploration of a social-media-driven teenage milieu, also loses its potency here, cast into the periphery and underdeveloped. Once neglected, this modern foundation, with which Talk to Me crafts its most chilling scares, sees the constituent themes misspent and wrought into out-of-shape narrative holes. However, these shortcomings could find themselves attributed to the gung-ho naivety that plague many a debut, and, although somewhat disappointing, don’t completely detract from the gripping thematic substratum of ideas the film boldly throws at its canvas.
The Verdict
Talk to Me is fiendishly terrifying—a propulsive, bone-crunching ride into the depths of grief, serving more than its fair share of scares, even if feeling a little over-encumbered in its final moments. Horror is at its best when in the hands of those who care for the genre, and Talk to Me underscores the paramount importance of writing rooms, originality and artistic freedom.
Talk to Me is in UK Cinemas from 28th July
Words by Samuel Parkes
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