Movie Review: Talk to Me

Rating: 85/100

Trigger warning for suicide, drugs, death of family members

I give that as a trigger warning for the review, but it’s also the trigger warning that I wish was given to me before watching this movie. In Talk to Me—a supernatural Australian horror flick from Danny and Michael Phillippou from a concept by Daley Pearson—a group of teenagers start playing a clearly dangerous game.

The way it works is that there’s an embalmed hand that they set on the table, and then someone lights a candle. The person grasps the hand and says “Talk to me,” at which point a spirit can be seen on the other end shaking their hand. If the person playing then says “I let you in,” the spirit is able to enter the participant’s body and take it over. After the spirit leaves their body, it creates a feeling of euphoria like doing a drug. That is, assuming that the spirit didn’t make you do anything you regret. But someone has to disconnect you after 90 seconds, or the spirit will want to stay.

The film centers around Mia (Sophie Wilde), a teenage girl who was adopted by a family after her mother died under circumstances that seem like they may or may not have indicated suicide. Mia and her adopted brother Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and Riley (Joe Bird) find themselves at a party where this dark game is being played, and Mia, always the thrill seeker with a penchant for addictive things, gets hooked on the game.

The trouble comes when young Riley tries the hand and claims to be inhabited by the spirit of Mia’s deceased mother. Mia lets Riley’s session go on a little too long, desperate to talk to her mother, but in the process, she opens up a door to the other side that she can’t seem to close even if she wanted to (which she clearly doesn’t). Less a traditional horror movie and more of a Greek tragedy with jump scares, Talk to Me goes down a dark and sad path, ending in one of the most cold and unforgiving ways since Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell in 2009.

I lost my mother to lung cancer when I was only 23, so a movie surrounding a dead mother hits home for me in an extremely uncomfortable way. Mia’s love for her mother is not a source of strength, but rather her fatal flaw that keeps her from seeing the obvious signs that she’s being tricked and should turn back. For me, it went to an emotional place that doesn’t make a horror movie entertaining for me anymore. Rather than being able to scold the character for continuing to make one obvious mistake after the other like a viewer yelling at the girl not to go upstairs in a slasher movie, I found myself completely unsure if I would have had the emotional fortitude to turn away such an opportunity if I were in Mia’s place. That’s not the kind of emotional journey that I find to be a fun one to go through when watching a horror film.

I also admit that I don’t particularly enjoy going down a movie’s emotional path to be lead to a place where good people are punished for things that aren’t moral failings. A big part of the reason I could never stand Game of Thrones wasn’t just the violence of the show—although that was excessive—but rather the fact that it took place in a morally deprived world with almost no redeeming characters in which attempts to be honorable and noble are violently punished by a cruel and heartless sense of fate.

I’d much rather watch something like my favorite show, Doctor Who, in which, even though characters have moral flaws, they still find their way to redemption, as the show exists in a just reality. So that became another part of this movie that made it hard for me to watch; this is movie exists in a brutal world that doesn’t care who’s innocent and who’s guilty and is certainly not concerned with degrees of guilt.

If none of that scares you off from this movie, then more power to you. I will admit that it fulfills the requirement I was once taught by a writing professor in college who said that the perfect ending is both inevitable and surprising at the same time. Talk to Me absolutely achieves that inevitable/surprising dialectic, so I can hardly fault the movie for the strength of its writing and plot. But just as the unsuspecting teens in the movie itself who found themselves going down a path they didn’t intend should have done in the first place, the viewer would best be served by exercising caution.

Photo courtesy of  Talk to Me