Talk to Me

Directors -  Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou

Writers - Danny Philippou, Bill Hinzman, Daley Pearson

2022, Australia

Stars - Ari McCarthy, Hamish Phillips, Kit Erhart-Bruce

 

With a strong one-take opening set-up and a decent horror premise, ‘Talk to Me’ soon becomes predicated upon the idiocy of young adults. Once they learn that the porcelain hand they touch and incant to will grant them temporary possession by the dead, they treat this as a party trick for yucks and vids (vids automatically dismissed as “fake”). So although we are meant to empathise with Mia (Sophia Wilde), she’s a bit of an asshole… well, she’s young. And is it her grief over her dead mother that makes her more a target for predatory spirits? This might be seen as meanness and as the territory of horror, and certainly the whole film plays out like a manifestation of her isolation and persecution complex, but there’s a decided lack of self-awareness to the film to its own ramifications. The most direct victims are casualties of Mia inability to resolve her grief, so this theme is very present.

Indeed, the supernatural rules appear a little random when it seems to have side-effects for a few but not for others. What about the apparent Christian boyfriend that soon gets swept up and plays along with dabbling with the Dark Arts despite manifestly positive results? It’s an opportunity the film just sidesteps. Are you more susceptible the younger you are? Yes, it’s another horror that could benefit from a little more discipline and more texture to character. For example: Mia's family trauma is central, but her father is just a placemat.

The tone is not dissimilar to ‘Smile’ with duplicitous supernatural forces, failing reality and issues of mental health, and although that film was often scruffy, it owned more realised characters and genuine unease. As ‘Talk to Me’ meanders to martyrising Mia and to a logical conclusion (although the audience I saw it with did laugh), the cruellest stuff is saved for the least deserving (yeah, he won’t recover from that) in a film not self-aware enough to address its themes of peer pressure, or unresolved grief, or youth’s trivialising of death – Death, which is seemingly a devilish tricker that wants to con you into murder. It goes for the downer ending currently in vogue, but ‘Talk to Me’ is too superficial to touch the disturbing horror of injustice, leaving the hand still out there for potential franchise and improvement.

Smoking Causes Coughing - Fumer fait tousser

Smoking Causes Coughing

Fumer fait tousser

Writer & Director – Quentin Dupieux

2022, France

Stars – Gilles Lellouche, Vincent Lacoste, Anaïs Demoustier

Dupieux films often start with the WTF? element upon realising what the premise is, followed by a steady run of amusement as you settle into the surreal humour. ‘Smoking Causes Coughing’ – which is, alone, a perverse title for a Super Sentai parody – has that and digressions aplenty, being somewhat a portmanteau. These smaller stories are great too. If Dupieux’s last film, ‘Incredible But True’, introduced some genuine human frailty into his irreverence and surrealist farce, just as ‘Deerskin’ was off-beatly disturbing, ‘Smoking’ gives free reign to his silliness and non sequiturs. Suicidal robot team member? A larder supermarket? Sleeping in hero helmets? A grotesque puppet-sensei, the kind found in low budget superhero series for kids, but one that turns all the women on? But we are talking a superhero team ridiculously based upon smoking, although it doesn’t quite fully satirise branding.

And yet with one tale shows that Dupieux can’t help tweaking slashers (ref. ‘Rubber’ and ‘Deerskin’) and satirising the genre (in one of the film’s best gags, one character can’t help selfy-ing even when confronted with a horror scenario and would rather argue her right to do so than act in the interest of survival). And the barracuda… well. Dare it be said that this quietly distinctive-divisive director is finding a way for his absurdist schtick to nudge the commercial? If ‘Incredible But True’ had existential concerns about the self, ‘Smoking Causes Coughing’ goes for the scatological comedy, punctuated by horror gross-outs. It never adds up to much, but never has Dupieux’s silliness been so digressive, appealing, consistent, and not just amusing and clever but funny. 

Perfect

Perfect

Director – Eddie Alcazar

Writers – Ted Kupper & Eddie Alcazar

2018, USA

Stars - Garrett Wareing, Courtney Eaton, Tao Okamoto

 

The voiceover ranges from teenage existentialism to earnest ad-speak, but no matter how poignant it is trying to be (and such overspeak rarely is), it is clear very early that the full worth of ‘Perfect’ is mostly all in the visuals and vibe. Not that the storyline doesn’t have promise – an oddball young man seemingly waking to a bloodbath, apparently having killed his girlfriend? and so sent to some kind of corrective retreat to “cure” him - but the abstract aesthetic takes over, leaving the storyline somewhat incoherent. But this seems wilful and much of the enjoyment will be, as a viewer, you are won over by the aesthetic and vibe over conventional clarity of story. It certainly works for Terence Malick.

 

It seems our protagonist (Garrett Wareling) is Vessel 13 whose penchant for violence for women during blackouts has to be cured at the institute like a self-help retreat, with added body-horror. An automaton, then, and these automatons sex toys? Certainly, the Pretty Things Posing vibe is suggestive. There’s a seductive glossiness that has this future all for the rich and indulgent, but that’s not an issue that rears its head here.

 

 

The house this is set in is remarkable (The Goldstein Mansion), so much so that when the film eventually reaches a peak, it retreats into a prolonged drone-tour while the narration rambles on (perhaps the voiceover here explicated more, but I was fairly tuned out as it seemed me more existential pontificating). Cronenberg is an obvious touchstone, what with the sci-fi body-horror and obsession with transformation, but there’s none of the clinical-but-exploitative edge of his early work to really make it pop with black humour and genre-bending intelligence. Rather, the floaty abstract glossy designer magazine visuals may not culminate in decipherable meaning, although the nightmare logic and the psychedelic tone almost make the need for that surplus. But this lack of clarity is also problematic in that it isn’t so easy to parse the intention; or as Mariso Carpico writes’ “watching it feels like an 80-minute commercial for an opulent, minimalist lifestyle told through a kink for sexual violence against women.” 

 

Garrett Wareling’s boyish innocence manages a grounding vulnerability, his confusion and internal conflict at least relatable character traits that provide a throughline where all other characters are tokens. As a mood piece, it achieves a distinct aura and, as with most ambience, the reward will be in simply letting it wash over you and do its thing without asking too much. But then there are two shockers at the end that stake the films’ claim on your taste for the Horror genre; and it’s here that ‘Perfect’ shrugs off its trippy elusiveness to imply “See? We were building to something.” Certainly, unforgettable as these are, it’s still not clear what. Hints of Panos Cosmatos, David Cronenberg,* David Lynch, Terence Malick – all the right names, then, and great mood; but despite its message about overcoming flaws, it lacks the definition to make its agenda about superficial sexual models and violence truly and rightfully clear. 

 

 

 

·        * Both version of ‘Crimes of the Future’ indicate how such material can be approached with clinical detachment and/or dark humour.