Man, we’re going to end this Halloween with a bang! I can feel it. This is the Australian movie that went around the world – Talk to Me, the film out of Adelaide with the kids and the creepy hand. On the surface, it seems to me to be a lot like Flatliners, and after watching it, it has the best elements of Smile and Bodies Bodies Bodies thrown in there as well. My, oh, my!
Mia (Sophie Wilde) has just commiserated the two-year anniversary of her mother’s suicide ☹ Her peers seem to find her annoying, except for her one friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen), who invites her to tag along to a late-night booze up where the hosts are keen to show off the supernatural hand they’ve found. Yes, a supernatural hand. Mia volunteers for the demonstration first; holding the hand and exclaiming, “talk to me”, instantly connects her to a ghost in the room. Then, by saying “I let you in”, the ghost possesses Mia, and providing this happens for less than 90 seconds, it’s bloody good fun. Later on, the kids take turns having a hoot with the random ghost personalities they find, until, of course, things go awry. And you thought continually poking around a portal to the spirit realm would be fine? Brothers Danny and Micheal Phillipou present Talk to Me as their writer/director debut – and can someone tell me if they’re any relation to Mattaes, future St. Kilda superstar?
Talk to Me has such a simple premise, and does an excellent job setting it up, in a completely vibrant and interesting way. I must be out of school too long, for I’d forgotten about the sorts of kids that exist to make everything into a spiteful laugh; and now that camera phones and social media exists, it only fuels another layer to the diffusion of responsibility, when snapping the most salacious vid can get you clout. Bored and angsty kids can be fucking senseless, and whilst I feel fortunate to have forgotten it, this movie does so well in capturing the same electric teen atmosphere that it had my memories flooding back. It means that this scenario can exist void of logic, where, while there is no way in hell that I would participate in this charade, to these kids it only matters not to be the one to pussy out – it’s believable, that’s what I like about it.
And, at its best, Talk to Me is spook-central! I’ve skipped over The Pope’s Exorcist and The Exorcist: Believer this year, but it seems I cannot escape possessed children cackling and trying to pull their own eye out, and nor should I really! I think Talk to Me also hinges on getting us to care about Riley (Joe Bird) before his possession, and sympathise with Mia as a quiet outcast shouldering her own internal pain; and mission accomplished, on both fronts. These young actors are all wonderful, and unknowns to me, particularly notable for embodying their relatable characters, as well as going all out once the possessions hit – and look, there hasn’t even been a new Round the Twist in a while, so these kids haven’t even had the opportunity to excel at Australia’s premier level of acting; Joe Bird could’ve made a killer Bronson, but we’ll never know 😏 I was squirming, white-knuckled in the scene where he goes over the agreed 50 seconds mark, basically turning into a parody of Daniel Day Lewis screaming, “DON’T ABANDON MY BOY! DON’T ABANDON MY CHILD!”
But is it just me, or does what actually happen in Talk to Me remain a little murky? This is what I think happens – by initially going over the 90 seconds, it allowed the second and more evil spirit to enter Mia, the one said to be standing behind Riley that we don’t see; and it eventually figures out that showing Mia her mother, is a great way to keep manipulating her. I believe Riley was genuinely possessed by Mia’s mother, although it could’ve been a hallucination, and when Mia touched Riley while under, it allowed the Freddy-Kruger-man we see later on in the hospital bed, to walk across the open channel and take Riley – the one he wanted all along. This doesn’t explain the strange toe-sucker scene through, which perhaps is only meant to indicate to us that Mia is not alright, while the entity merely means to alienate her from her few remaining friends. It also doesn’t explain what happened to the well-dweller of a woman that we see initially possess Mia, or why when Mia comes out of her trance, she proclaims that her experience was awesome; or is this just explainable because Mia is already compromised by then? Ah, I do feel like I’m trying to fit a square peg in a round hole for this movie’s story to make complete sense, although I definitely could be missing something 🤔 It is quite sad that Mia had to die though, misunderstood as a psycho killer, especially when you pair it with the fact that her true desires were merely to reconcile from her mother’s suicide ☹ Bold move for her to kill herself – and I think it was the right call, but there’s a chance it wasn’t at all, and Riley is still in a hospital bed somewhere, totally stuffed. But I guess that’s what sequels are for, and there’s always room to expand on the most unhappiest of endings 😈 I also think Talk to Me might be somewhat deliberately ambiguous, and half the fun is doing the mental arithmetic into the unknown, figuring out how things be. I am annoyed at myself for not seeing that ending coming though – it was sitting right there, promising perfect symmetry, with Mia now being directed by the hand, and I missed it; very clever.
Somewhat negatively, and perhaps unfairly, but after recognising a similar structure to that of last year’s Smile, I thought there might have been the possibility for a few more scares than we actually got, and I was surprised to find the movie’s story plateaus, or, more accurately, settles in, after what it does to Riley, staying with his dilemma and how to fix him for the rest of the runtime. But all in all, taking the good with the bad, Talk to Me is undoubtedly a spooky fun tale, and a really interesting debut for some budding Aussie directors. It does make me I wonder what they’ll do next, and that’s always a favourable position to be in with a bright future ahead. Some movies would be satisfied to boast one big moment to make you wheeze and squirm, but Talk to Me consolidates a huge three – the shocking beginning, Riley banging his head like a madman, and poor Mia accidentally killing her father. But for all this movie’s traditional horror, the most harrowing thing to stand out from Talk to Me is that someone is choosing to run with the ‘Crazy Frog’ as their ringtone in 2023. Why couldn’t have Jade got murdered, just for that?
4.0
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