Talk To Me (2022)

directed by Michael Phillipou, Danny Phillipou

Australia

95 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Talk To Me is a bad vibes movie for the ages. I will be discussing full plot spoilers. This review is not good because I have not slept in too long.

We start the movie off in the passenger seat and remain there for the next 95 minutes, whether that's where we want to be or not. The film semi-cold-opens into a party, a handsomely rendered continuous shot of a boy looking for somebody named "Ducket" who we later find out is/was his younger brother. The scene ends abruptly when Ducket stabs first his brother and then himself; while Ducket remains dead, the brother survives, and will become important later on in the film.

The protagonist of the film is Mia (Sophie Wilde), an outwardly cheerful young woman with an unremarkable circle of friends and normal teenager problems. She's not perfect, and neither is anybody else here, and that's why it's so easy to get wrapped up in their lives. For something that feels so character-driven, there are somehow still almost no characters in Talk To Me who feel like they have much in the way of personality (one exception being Cookie the bulldog, of course). Instead of hindering our immersion in the story, this actually makes it easier to put ourselves in the same frame of mind as the characters, because these don't really feel like "movie people", they just feel like average teenagers who have, before the movie started, done things that we as viewers are not privy to. The party trick/party ritual of linking with another plane by holding an embalmed hand and saying a specific formula is established to have been going on since well before the movie started.

About thirty minutes into the film I thought I had it pegged, and I was planning on writing something in my review about how this isn't a terribly original idea for a horror film (teenage party ghost summoning gone wrong) but that it's done refreshingly well here, with a cast of actors who put together a very strong ensemble performance. Those latter two points remained true, but the further I got into the film, the more it started throwing things at me that were more brutal than I had expected. There is a specific moment where it really pulls out all the stops and goes full Event Horizon; that was when I thought "Oh, this is something different, now."

The concept of this movie is horrific because it seems to objectively be real within the universe of the film, and if it is objectively real, then it posits an afterlife that's worse than anything even ancient Greeks and Babylonians could have thought up. But it feels like there's more nuance here. I think we have to go back to the protagonist and consider that the events of the movie are necessarily being filtered through her lens.

The term "grief horror" is perennially hot, to the point where I feel like probably about 2% of the media it's applied to is actually worth watching, but there's clearly an element of it to be found in Talk To Me. Mia has been struggling with her mother's death for two years, trying to reckon with the fact that despite what she wants to believe, it really does seem like it might have been a suicide. This desperate desire to believe is her weak point, and whatever is going on on the other side takes advantage of it. Mia is eventually able to talk to her mother using the embalmed-hand party-trick hell-telephone-thing, and her mother tells her everything she wants to hear: that she didn't kill herself, that she'd never leave her, and then, while Mia's "mother" has her ear, she says oh, by the way, there's nothing but suffering and torment on the other side of death, and your friend's little brother is in endless agony, and you have to kill him to end it, and that isn't your real father, they're coming to get you, you know what you have to do. When the first message Mia hears is the only thing she's wanted to hear for the past two years, wouldn't it stand to reason she'd listen to anything else that message told her afterward, too?

So the horror here is largely Mia's personal horror, which makes it difficult to tease out exactly what's happening, objectively. There are these moments where it looks like maybe everything Mia has seen isn't quite true: when her friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) tells her that her brother seems to be recovering, and that he "seems like himself" instead of like he's trapped in the torment nexus the way Mia's mom and the other spirits want her to think, I started to wonder what was actually going on. But what are we supposed to make of those visions of a truly gruesome afterlife? And what about the ending? Did Mia damn herself through her own actions? Or, if any of the other characters had died, would they have gone there as well?

And I also just want to think about that hand for a minute. Given the backstory - the hand supposedly belonged to a medium or a Satanist or somebody who could contact the other side - it feels like the implication is that it's possible to become so saturated with that other world that even just the touch of your flesh can bring other people into it. If someone had cut off Mia's hand while she was still alive, would it have turned into another link to the horrible afterlife?

Letterboxd reviewers effectively sum Talk To Me up as "cold, bleak and icky", "hopeless and miserable", "gnaw[ing] at your soul and consum[ing] your spirit". All of these things are exactly correct. It is very, very good.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

directed by Roy William Neill

USA

74 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Some friends took me into Atlanta to catch the afternoon Silver Scream Spookshow presentation of this film last weekend, which was an all-around great time. The danger with seeing a movie in a theater is that I usually don't have my brain powered up enough to review it since I'm more focused on the overall experience of being in a theater; doubly so if I just watched a 30-minute live stage show with puppetry and antics and skits and whatnot. But Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man kind of crept up on me, so I want to get some thoughts about it down in writing.

(Also please note that I basically have never watched a Universal monster movie so I might say some things here that would be "Well, yeah, duh" territory to anyone who has.)

The thing that really struck me about this movie was the incredibly sympathetic portrayal of the Wolf Man. At the beginning of the film he is dug up from his grave by tomb robbers looking for fresh-ish corpses with money on them, and despite having "died" four years ago, the man who in life was known as Larry Talbot somehow remains alive - very much against his will. Talbot is immediately, horrifyingly aware of his situation - of his status of a lycanthrope - but no one around him will take him seriously. There is something so deeply tragic about seeing Talbot plead, essentially, "I have no control over my own actions, when the full moon strikes I am a passenger in my own body, I am committing acts that are reprehensible to me and I desperately need to die because there is no other way for me to stop myself" and having no one listen to him.

The practical effects makeup here is obviously ahead of its time and an enormous amount of effort was put into what amounts to probably about 0.15% of the running time of an already quite short movie - our (g)host Professor Morte mentioned that the initial transformation scene was done over the course of eight hours and that Lon Chaney Jr. had to stay in the same pose on a pillow that was made out of plaster because a real pillow would have shifted around too much and ruined the real-time transformation effect. That is all remarkable, but what I think really cinched this movie was Chaney's performance as Talbot. Not as the Wolf Man - as Talbot. He has this forlorn expression on most of the time, and carries himself with the body language of a man heavily burdened, who knows that he doesn't belong among the vibrant, carefree living humans around him. Although this is a short, simple film, the true horror of being the Wolf Man is conveyed in a way that I found extremely compelling.

I haven't mentioned Bela Lugosi in heavy makeup as Frankenstein's Monster because he was somewhat of a weak point in the film to me, which from what I understand had a lot to do with behind-the-scenes decisions to cut a lot of his lines. I also think that every other character besides the two monsters could basically have been an NPC with the exception of Maleva, whose genuine care and compassion for the Wolf Man and total acceptance of him as a being did move me deeply.

One of the friends I was with pointed out the "economy of storytelling" in this film, which I agree is definitely one of its strong points; the plot moves along very quickly and doesn't get stuck on any one point or another for longer than feels necessary. It is a pleasure to watch a 74-minute film that feels like it got its entire message across and couldn't have been longer if it tried. I'm attempting to muster the effort to say that there's also something about this simplicity that is a detriment to the film, because although any more length would probably have drawn the plot out further than it could handle, in the end, instead of a satisfying conclusion, we basically get... nothing. Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man fight, the dam possibly gets blown up, we see some great practical effects, and then the "The End" card hits and we all left the theater. Just another ten minutes could have made that ending feel like an actual ending.

Jigoku (1960)

directed by Nobuo Nakagawa

Japan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I have returned from my hiatus to kick off the spooky season with a film that I could superlatively describe with an awful pun¹ but am consciously choosing not to.

I happen to be in the middle of reading The Penguin Book of Hell at the moment, and that combined with my overall interest in religious studies makes for a mindset that is intensely receptive of everything Jigoku lays on its viewers. Something that I think any secular observer (and probably a good deal of non-secular observers) will begin to notice once they've been exposed to enough visions of various religions' underworlds is that after a while it really feels like concepts of an afterlife full of torment say more about the god or gods who created such a place than they do about the people who have been sentenced to live in them for eternity.

Case in point: the main character of Jigoku, Shiro Shimizu (played by Shigeru Amachi). An extremely normal person, guilty of essentially nothing by his own hand and by the standards of today's society, who ends up damned to hell alongside a crowd of his family, friends, and vague acquaintances, all of whom are objectively more "sinful" than him. Things seem to go very wrong whenever Shimizu is around, but again, none of it is his fault: his first "crime" is simply being the passenger during a hit-and-run that ends up claiming the life of a supposedly big-cheese yakuza, whose girlfriend and mother immediately begin plotting revenge not just on Tamura (we'll get to him in a moment - oh, boy, will we ever), the man driving the car, but on Shimizu, who happened to be in that place at that time because he wanted to take a different route than Tamura did.

Very shortly after the first car accident, before Shimizu has really had time to recover, he finds himself in another accident that ends up taking the life of his fiancée, Yukiko (the lovely Utako Mitsuya). Again, it is not directly his fault, but he is in the situation because he insisted on taking a taxi when Yukiko wanted to walk. He could justifiably walk away from both incidents carrying no blame whatsoever, but instead he chooses to take the burden on himself - therefore damning himself even before his death to a life in which he deems himself a murderer.

While Shimizu is the protagonist, arguably the most fascinating character in Jigoku is Shimizu's "friend" Tamura (Yōichi Numata). Every time I rewatch this, I spend the entire movie wondering if Tamura was ever human at all. He shows up out of nowhere accompanied by a sound (whether diegetic or not is hard to tell) like an onrushing train and seems to goad Shimizu further into believing life is nothing but sin and degeneration until you inevitably die and suffer for all eternity. He revels in others' suffering, and is oftentimes the cause of it: Tamura is the one who should logically be held accountable for the first accident, but instead he ropes Shimizu into sharing the blame, and later snipes at him for trying to "sell him out" - as if he is not the one actually culpable for a crime. We don't ever find anything out about Tamura as a person: where he's from, why he's attracted to Shimizu, what his overall problem is. Even Shimizu wonders "who is this guy?" at one point. When Tamura dies, he's no less of a bizarre psychopomp - he is, in fact, more of one. Numata's sudden shift into full kabuki actor mode when Tamura visits Shimizu in hell (only to be chastised by a force even more evil than himself, leading one to believe that Tamura was perhaps human all along) is one of my favorite moments in the latter part of the film.

The world is faintly hellish even while Shimizu is still alive. The disquieting atmosphere is so similar to Nakagawa's later film Yotsuya Kaidan that I looked up the cinematographer for Jigoku, expecting to see them credited for that film as well, only to find that Yotsuya Kaidan and Jigoku share no crew members aside from composer Chumei Watanabe. I think the nightmarish imagery is largely carried by both Nakagawa and art director Haruyasu Kurosawa, who worked on numerous other horror movies, but Watanabe's score certainly does a lot to help the sense of a deeply haunted world that we feel while watching the film as well.

So, arguably, the most horrifying thing about Jigoku is not the elaborately staged underworld scenes, featuring people being flayed, decapitated, boiled, reduced to skeletons, bashed in the teeth with hammers &c, it's the fact that, like, there's a baby down there, dude. If Shimizu can get damned not only by himself but along with his girlfriend, his unborn child, his sister, and his parents for things that he was both not really guilty of and in one case was not even aware he was doing - if there are gods who will damn a baby to eternal torment to that - then those gods are infinitely more frightening than the demons bashing people's teeth in with hammers. And maybe even more frightening than that is the idea that maybe Shiro only went there because he felt like he deserved to be there.

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1 It is, in point of fact, one hell of a movie.