"Talk to Me" Takes Horror Back to Basics
Australian YouTuber twins Danny and Michael Phillippou have crafted a potent posession chiller without frills or pretension.
Over the past decade, movie studio A24 has produced enough indie hits to inspire a cultish attitude amongst a growing cadre of Pinterest-obsessed fangirls and post-Tarantino film bros. Their cultural domination isn’t based strictly in any one genre—their titles range from the somber beauty of Moonlight to the panic-attack furor of Uncut Gems to the genre-hopping extravaganza of Everything Everywhere All At Once. Yet A24 has still managed to make something of a name for itself in the horror genre, specifically in what has come to be known as “elevated” horror: a supposed subgenre that refers ambiguously to movies like Hereditary, The Lighthouse, and Saint Maud and which attempts to legitimize the horror genre to critical audiences. These are horror movies which garner critical acclaim more for their psychological complexity than their sense of dread, for their subtle examinations of trauma than their eye-splitting violence. And while many of these movies are good—the three I just listed are excellent—the notion of horror’s supposed “elevation” can also be frustratingly elitist. Take Midsommar: A24’s calling card for “elevated horror” is also a self-described “breakup movie,” with inspirations ranging from The Wicker Man to Modern Romance. There’s some remarkable formalism and detailed character work to be found in this film, and despite a couple of well-timed instances of gnarly gore, you’d be hard-pressed to find even an ounce of the shock-and-awe terror that the genre normally demands.
Talk to Me, A24’s latest excursion into horror, feels like a direct response to a decade-plus of cinema whose “elevation” has begun to feel more than a little stale. This is an out-and-out Scary Movie from Australian twins Danny and Michael Phillippou, who themselves developed their craft on their YouTube channel RackaRacka—an action-horror-comedy content machine that might be insufferable if it weren’t for some impressive DIY chops. Those chops bleed nicely into Talk to Me, their debut feature film; they have also thankfully shed some of their ultraviolent weirdness.
The Phillippous set up their nightmare with the classicism of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre or a Blair Witch Project. In a South Australian suburb, a group of idiot teens dick around with something they don’t understand—in this case, an embalmed human hand that communes with the dead. It’s a clever bit of prop design, one that has both the portability and the intoxication of a good gravity bong—a smart twist on a cabin-in-the-woods story device. Whenever one of the teens grasps onto its twisted, chalk-white fingers and whispers “Talk to me,” a spirit appears before them: scared, disturbed, woefully gross. And for those brave enough to say “I let you in,” that spirit will violently wrest control from their body, with blacked-out eyes and unpredictable gesticulations.
The Hand recalls satanic objects like the Ouija board, and the Phillippous have transplanted that uncaniness into a contemporary milieu. The moment that Mia (Sophie Wilde), the film’s seventeen-year-old protagonist, first allows a spirit takes control of her body, she does it amid a crowd of Snapchat-obsessed teenagers with cameras at the ready. As she writhes and screams while possessed by an unkind spirit, her peers barely lift a finger; they’re too captivated, too enthralled, too hungry for good content. This kind of satire of the WorldStar content machine is deliciously entertaining, but the Phillippous never dwell on it long enough to be incisive. Talk to Me is all the better for it: the movie is more interested in creating creepy atmospheres than relishing in overwrought social commentary. There’s still some literary material strewn about if you want to analyze it, notably in how Mia, grieving the loss of her two-years-dead mother, finds herself turning to the thrill of The Hand like a junkie to a needle. If you want to read into the Trauma Plot here, you could, but Talk to Me never belabors the point. Midsommar this is not.
The thrills of possession begin innocently enough, but things inevitably go awry. Mia soon forces her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) to get The Hand’s owners—cool-kids Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio)—to host a marathon possession session while mum is out of town. The scene that follows, played to the tune of an instrumental hip-hop banger by composer Cornel Wilczek, has the teens writhing and squirming in disgusted delight, with the onlookers all the more elated at seeing their peers in otherworldly suffering. This is the film’s most singularly entertaining sequence, and serves as a convincing setup for film’s second-act pivot into violence that begins once Jade’s younger brother Riley (Joe Bird) asks for a chance to take in a spirit. The film’s possession mechanic means that its acts of mutilation are uncontrollable and self-inflicted, and the Phillippous, talented craftsmen, never shy away from the gory detail of a popping eyeball or a knife to the forehead.
Despite their talents, the Phillippous struggle to frame the film within a singular perspective, a flaw that becomes all the more noticeable as the Talk to Me hones in on subjective self-destruction. The film sets itself up as a story recounted from Mia’s perspective—we understand The Hand through her obsessive lens—but it then allows the camera to wander elsewhere, to become an omniscient third-person narrator to check in on side characters. It’s all the more frustrating as the film goes on: Jade and Riley are inherently less interesting than being trapped behind Mia’s singular perspective, which carries a hallucinatory potency. Her mind becomes torn increasingly asunder as the story wears on, and Talk to Me renders some truly terrifying psychedelia through her subjectivity. We begin to lose track of reality as she does, and when the violence comes, you’re squirming for it not to happen. The Phillippous are also blessed to have Sophie Wilde in the lead role: she carries the intensity of Mia’s demonic possession with grounded authenticity.
Much of the film’s plot emerges from high school soap opera tropes, as with a pleasantly schmaltzy love-triangle drama between Mia, Jade, and Jade’s boyfriend Daniel (Otis Dhanji). There’s also a wonderful performance by Miranda Otto as Jade and Riley’s militant mother, who gives the film its sole sense of parental authority. But all of that is set dressing for sequences involving The Hand, when our high school protagonists find themselves drunk on the thrills of being controlled by demons. The Phillippous excel at crafting immersive horror setpieces with their status-obsessed teenagers, all of which builds to a finale that is punishingly circular. This inevitability is what sets Talk to Me apart from its A24 compatriots. There are only the barest intimations of ideas like Grief or Trauma, and these concepts, however interesting, never take priority over the scares. The Phillipous aren’t trying to write a dissertation on twisted psychology or warped family histories. They are making a horror movie: nothing less, nothing more. They want you to be afraid.