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.