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.