Talk To Me
Directed by Danny and Michael Philippou
Running time: 1hr35 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Sophie Wilde in Talk To Me
Michael and Danny Philippou, twin filmmakers from Australia, are better known in certain sections of the internet for their YouTube Channel RackaRacka, which has clocked up over one billion views to date on around 150 videos released across the last decade. Perhaps the experience of trying out multiple ideas, with slightly lower stakes than the cinematic theatrical release model, is part of what makes their feature debut Talk To Me so fresh and confident.
The movie’s premise will feel familiar and comfortable for most people with even a passing interest in horror or the supernatural: a severed hand allows teenagers to perform a kind of seance-like ritual whereby they can contact the dead. Or rather, be possessed by the dead. But this ain’t your grandaddy’s seance – the possessed person here is as likely to make out with a pet dog as they are to politely relay a cryptic message from the beyond. And it’s the edgelord hilarity of the antics involved (plus the ability to livestream it all), as much as the trifling matter of conclusive proof of life after death, which seems to motivate the characters here to toy with supernatural forces.
And isn’t that just perfect? The inherent teenage-ness of the teenagers here is brilliantly realised. There was a tendency in 1980s horror to write teens as simply stupid, thereby allowing them to go blundering off into poorly lit areas of Camp Crystal Lake. This then led to the opposite trend in the 1990s: teenage characters so hyper-aware of genre conventions it was hard to get them to even take their own deaths seriously, leading eventually to parodies like Scary Movie, where a cheerleader’s head scornfully quips away after it has been detached from her body.
Talk To Me threads the needle between these two positions: these onscreen teenagers here are believable people that you can imagine meeting, or even having been yourself, but whose natural caution is blunted by peer pressure and the influence of groupthink. They’re by no means smarter than real-life teenagers, with all the tendency towards poor risk assessment and attraction to drama this implies, but they’re not wildly dumber than IRL teens, either. That creates very real tension, because you can’t quite predict what decisions they’re going to make, even as you buy into them as characters. I don’t say this lightly, as I’m a huge fan of the 1999 Devon Sawa slacker horror Idle Hands, but for providing decent jumps and scares within a compelling character-driven context, Talk To Me is a serious new contender for best ever evil-hand-themed horror movie.
TALK TO ME (2023) Written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman | Shot by Aaron McLisky | Edited by Geoff Lamb
In cinemas now
