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.

Celia (1989)

directed by Ann Turner

Australia

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Note: I am still extremely busy and haven't had the time to write anything new, so this is an old review that I've dug up from my archives and reworked for quality. My apologies - by hook or by crook I will be back to writing new reviews next week.

Celia is a horror movie (if it can be called a horror movie at all) where the horror is experienced through a child's perspective, it's also a movie that presents that horror as part of the experience of being a child. The horror here is inextricable from personal experience instead of existing as an external force that can be corroborated by an outside observer. What this movie is really about is how the worlds of children and the worlds of adults are often totally incompatible and incomprehensible to each other. The title character is a nine-year-old girl who has a relatively normal childhood (insofar as any childhood can be called "normal"), with all of life's mysteries still yet to be revealed, and to her - and, arguably, objectively - all of the adults in her life act against what she believes to be morally correct. 

A really good example of this last point is the way the film deals with politics. A running theme is the ruling by the then-PM of Australia that all rabbits, including those belonging to children as pets, are to be rounded up and killed, as they are considered vermin. Celia has to cope with this despite not having the capacity to understand it the way adults do. At one point she draws devil features on a picture of the PM in class and is told off for it by the teacher. While the adults view this as extremely disrespectful, they don't see that Celia is interpreting the PM's actions according to the rules of engagement that govern her and her peers: it does not follow that this man should be above recourse, he's a stranger who is telling Celia that her beloved pet is to be surrendered and killed, what is she supposed to do? Not fight back? Celia has no internalized concept of politics or the idea of respecting someone solely based on their office: she treats the PM the same way she would treat her own contemporaries.

Another running theme is the adults around Celia attempting to force her into cutting off relationships based on their own fears of communism. Celia also deals with this the same way she'd deal with a contemporary: you tell me they're communists, and that they're bad people, but they've never hurt me or my friends, and they're always kind to me, so how can they be bad people just because you say they are? The logic the adults follow is the strange stuff here, not what Celia does - the fallacy of shunning some people because of their beliefs and blindly following the rule of others - of strangers - simply because they hold the highest office in the land is presented as a more childish belief than the rituals and games Celia involves herself with.

The way Celia's most heinous act (not spoiling it) is dealt with is also interesting because I think a lot of other movies would make that the thing that ends the film. Other movies wouldn't show, afterwards, her doing something else that could have ended in a similarly disastrous fashion, but didn't. They would make it a black-and-white issue: as soon as Celia did it, she would have been established as being in the wrong. But the mock hanging of her friend afterwards shows that the balance between life and death, justice and injustice, and the definition of what is and isn't a violent act does not hold constant between the worldviews of children and those of adults. It doesn't cast judgement on Celia for what she did or place blame on the people in her life for not teaching her right; it presents her as someone with agency who made a logical choice according to the way she understood justice and reciprocity.

I very much enjoyed this movie and despite it not turning out to be what I'd call "horror" without reservations, I thought it was one of the better films to explore the unique anxiety of being a child. I intended to watch it as a Christmas movie but that didn't really work out.

Bedevil (1993)

directed by Tracey Moffatt

Australia

86 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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A lot of sources name this as the first feature film directed an Aboriginal Australian woman, but I'm wary of claims like that. Is it really the first, or is it just the first to get any kind of wide recognition? Even if it is the case that this is truly the first, the reasoning for that shouldn't be framed as a supposed lack of Aboriginal filmmakers, but with a society that has for so long prevented Aboriginal people from making films. Relevant to my specific interests, Bedevil also purported to be a horror film, or at least a creepy, supernatural film. That claim, at least, I can validate.

The film is split up into three segments, each dealing with a piece of local lore as told by the people who witnessed whatever event is at the center of the story. The first two segments are presented in almost a mockumentary style, a mix of present-day interviews with the people in question and flashbacks to the event they're describing as it actually unfolded. But there's something about the way these two stories are told - and I am deliberately focusing on the first two, because the third was a bit more inscrutable, and I'll get to it in time - that is entirely unlike the way you would typically think of a documentary or found-footage style film as being. These aren't formal, sit-down interviews, they're patchy recollections told almost as an aside while the interviewees are doing something else. Barely "interviews" at all, really; that term may be too formal for what in essence feels like a friend or at least an acquaintance telling us something that happened to them. It's almost like the focus is not on the story itself but on the people who lived the story - not the specific people, not in a biographical sense, but in the sense that at the heart of every legend shown to us in Bedevil is a real person who eventually grew up, moved on, and continued to live their life.

In "Mr. Chuck", two people relate parts of the same story. The story centers on a swamp that was rumored to have been haunted by the ghost of an American GI who drowned in it during WWII. The swamp as a physical location is a meeting place between three cultures: the Aboriginal people who have lived with it for tens of thousands of years; the white Australians, hungry for progress, building on the swamp like it's any tract of vacant land; and, only in ghostly form (or maybe as something worse) the specter of the American presence on the island. One of the storytellers is an Aboriginal man who, as a boy, fell into the swamp and experienced being physically touched by the spirit inhabiting it. The other is a white woman, the child of one of the developers who built a movie theater right on top of the swamp. While the woman manages to tell her story in a detached, impersonal way, describing with no facial expression how everyone knew that the boy who fell into the swamp had a bad home life and everybody could have helped him, but they didn't, the man seems physically haunted by his experience. He laughs about it, almost hysterically, but the way his face is downturned sometimes makes it look like he's crying. There's something incredibly, incredibly haunting about this segment - that feeling of what was once a human having been subsumed by the land that did not want him and turned, over decades, into something else. Something worse. I also find it really compelling that what was built on top of the swamp was a movie theater - a place where people go to live and relive stories, some of them, eventually, probably, being war stories.

"Choo Choo Choo Choo", the second segment, partially covers the Min Min Lights, an interesting phenomenon that I've known about for a while, but also involves a more personal story about a phantom train and the ghost of a little girl accidentally killed on its tracks. This is by far the most intimate telling: no formal, sit-down interviews; just the woman who witnessed the ghost train giving us tidbits of information when she's not rocking out in the bed of a truck with her netball group or busy cooking a wild pig underground. We feel familiar with this woman - at one point she comes up to the camera and wipes off the lens, like we the viewers are a messy child who's come to her with chocolate on our face. Everyone in the immediate vicinity seems to know about the story of the train, as we see that the people living around the tracks have actually developed a gesture to reference it - pumping one arm for the chugging of the wheels, then covering their eyes to represent the ghost girl who is inexorably paired with the train. Again, there's something deeply haunting about this, about hearing but not seeing disembodied noises in the night, knowing something is there, but not being able to touch it. But in the present, the woman is not haunted by it. She tells us how irritating it was to have the ghost girl come around, and then she has a little spat over the correct plating of seafood with her friend in their native language. What she experienced is a part of her life that she's conveying to us, and she's at ease with it.

The third segment, "Lovin' the Spin I'm In", has no interviews whatsoever and is entirely dramatized. It's also my least favorite segment, although it is as well-made and interesting as the previous two. It's the story of a landlord who owns a building inhabited by two Torres Strait Islander tenants who've been dead for many years, and the perspective is mostly through the eyes of a 14-year-old white boy in the building across the street. I think maybe the self-reflective nature of the first two stories was what made them engaging to me, because I had trouble getting into this one that was a more conventional narrative. It is eerie, unusual, and memorable, with the same gorgeous cinematography as the rest of the film, but it felt less interesting overall.

To talk of cinematography: this movie doesn't look like anything else I've ever seen. Moffat was heavily influenced by the aesthetic of Kwaidan, and it really shows, but at the same time Bedevil is its own thing. The film itself is unfortunately woefully obscure and your best chance of finding it is a garbage VHS rip that strips a lot of the visual intricacy from it, but you can still tell how innovative and unique the set design is. At first I thought the use of painted backdrops and what looks like just a bunch of Astroturf and fake shrubbery on a soundstage was something we were meant to not really see, but now I think it was very deliberate, and a brilliant choice. The parts of the film set in the present are filmed in a space that's clearly real, lucid, but the events of the past take place in a liminal zone that feels like a dream. The painted sunset looks more perfect than a real sunset could ever be, because it's not a real sunset, it's the way a sunset is captured as a static moment in our memory. The past segments feel like reenactments. The stories being told exist in an un-visitable eternal single moment that lives on not as an empirical truth but as a bodily, lived experience held within the tellers.

I was really taken in by this beautiful and strange film. People do know about it within certain circles, but it seems pretty obscure in the overall picture of Australian cinema. I'm not familiar with Tracey Moffat's other work as a video artist, but Bedevil has definitely left an impression on me, and I want to explore the other things she's created.