Talk to Me - Directed by Danny and Michael Philippou
The entertainment company A24 has developed something of a cult of personality with horror film fans as of late. They’ve had huge success with Ari Aster’s back-to-back films Hereditary and Midsommar. Ti West has been able to get his two masterpieces X and Pearl seen by audiences everywhere thanks to the same company. Other huge recent horror hits like Men, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and The Witch all owe their success in part to A24’s terrific distribution. A24’s success isn’t just in the distribution of horror. The company knows a hit when they see one and invest early. So much so that they’ve become the defacto production house for up-and-coming horror directors and so far their record is nearly sterling.
Their latest acquisition is Danny and Michael Philippou’s debut Talk To Me whose devastating script and charismatic cast help create a terrifying and heartbreaking tale of grief. The story follows Mia (Sophie Wilde), a teen struggling to cope with her mother’s accidental overdose. In the time since the death, Mia has moved in with her friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and Jade’s little brother Riley (Joe Bird). When Mia is roped into a party game that’s been making the rounds online, she’s shocked to discover the trick at the heart of the activity has very real, very unsettling properties. The game itself advertises that by grasping a ceramic hand and whispering, “talk to me”, one can speak with the dead. Once Mia realizes the full nature of this game, she becomes obsessed with trying to use the hand to communicate with her late mother, but that obsession begins to reap a disastrous toll on Jade and her family.
Obsession is a familiar enough trope in the horror genre but Talk To Me’s success comes from the modern tone set by its script and how endeared you become to the cast nearly right away. The film’s modernity gets going early thanks to nearly every character’s believable attachment to their phone. Like obsession the idea of a horror film’s cast being enraptured by viral videos (especially disturbing ones) is well trodden but it’s the slice of life approach to phones that sets Talk To Me atop a pedestal. Phones in this film are a means of connection. To friends, social lives, and even those we’ve lost. Mia rewatches old videos of her and her mom to remember her. Riley falls asleep watching his phone and even something this small rings a huge bell of truth with a cast of this age. Details like this that ground the reality of Talk To Me are what make it such a success. When the emotional punches start being thrown, they hurt that much more because we’re fully invested in the film’s world.
I can promise those emotional punches come and they hit hard. Mia and her friends have a blast taking videos of the hand forcing them to speak strangely and act even more strangely, but things quickly spiral out of control and young Riley winds up in the hospital. From the second things begin to go south Talk To Me doesn’t let up and soon it becomes clear that Mia is a dangerously unreliable narrator whose need for closure regarding the dead ends up bringing ruin to the living people still in her life.
Though the film is only ninety minutes long it smartly dedicates the majority of its first third to building believable bonds between Mia and Jade’s family. Horror films often fall by the wayside because they’re designed as killing machines that want to serve up a body count but what Talk To Me understands if that if the audience relates and cares about the characters the entire film will have a much stronger impact. So much time and care is given to making sure the performances, body language, and banter, all remind us of ourselves or people we hold dear. Because you’re invested in these people, you’re terrified when things turn sour for Jade and Riley, but you also carry an empathy for Mia and an understanding for why she continues to use the hand. The film plays with these feelings and over the course of the story you feel an emotional tug of war pulling back and forth between fear for Riley and heartbreak for Mia.
The script and direction do a lot of the work here, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit Wilde’s performance. She uses her small frame and massive eyes to give off the impression that she’s a wounded, terrified animal. She hunches in on herself like she’s in physical pain and as her reliance on the hand grows so do the involuntary twitches that wrack her body. This all comes as the film progresses and stands in stark contrast with the Mia of the film’s opening. At the start she’s a vibrant, energetic person and watching someone go through such a physical degradation in such a brief period is a true testament to Wilde’s physicality as an actor. Horror performances rarely get attention but hers is worth examination.
As a whole Talk To Me is a successful tale of desperation, desire, and destruction. It hits all the right notes to be a classic horror film and yet the feelings of dread it sets out to generate in its audience remain long after the credits roll. That’s truly great horror.
