Talk to Me is a mixed bag of a horror movie that tries to keep too many plates spinning to be as effective as it could be. Still, I’d rather have a horror movie with highs and lows and too many ideas than a movie with too few ideas doing only what’s been done before.
The movie is the feature debut of Australian filmmakers and brothers Danny and Michael Philippou. The brothers have a popular YouTube channel of horror-comedy videos, which I have not seen, but Talk to Me feels like it was birthed from short films that get maximum tension and punch from a few scenes. I just don’t think that the connective tissue between the scenes works as well as it should. Also know that Talk to Me definitely won’t be classified as a horror-comedy, but as straight supernatural horror.
Talk to Me is about a group of teenagers who have come into possession of a severed hand which, when used as part of a ceremony involving the phrase “Talk to me”, allows a selected member to see spirits in limbo and then they may allow the spirits to temporarily take possession of the user. The kids use this awesome power to liven up parties and make viral videos, and things go about as well as you assume they would.
Despite the kids often acting like morons (or because of it?), they actually seem like real teenagers unlike most horror movies. There’s nobody you want to see die, and you won’t be placing bets on who will die first, even if it were the kind of a movie where people get knocked off one by one, which it isn’t. You have empathy for the characters and the movie develops their relationships so we can see how they care for each other as well, which drives the plot forward. The audience’s empathy makes a couple hard-to-watch scenes in the movie that much more painful.
But the complex relationships also go to the film’s biggest weakness. We have the main charter’s relationship with her father (one of the two adult significant adult roles in the film) and the mystery of her dead mother, the triangle between her best friend and old boyfriend, and her relationship with her best friend’s Mom and younger brother as a surrogate family. And while all of these drive the plot, none of them are seen through to a satisfying conclusion that merits the time spent on them. I left the movie wondering what it was ‘about’; not that I require a moral or direct metaphor for the monsters, but Talk to Me seems to want to be about something more than the scares and doesn’t quite pull it off.
Still, the scares are effective and the movie builds up an atmosphere of desperation and dread. Even though it doesn’t really do much new with the idea of ghosts and possession and haunting, the presentation is novel and creepy and that’s enough for me to recommend it to horror enthusiasts. The filmmakers have good chops at making a scary movie and I look forward to see what they will do next.
Das Fressen 