Director: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Production Company: Screen Australia, South Australian Film Corporation, Adelaide Film Festival, Bankside Films, Head Gear Films, Metrol Technology, Causeway Films, Talk To Me Holdings
Country: Australia
Year: 2022
Most supernatural teen horror films are fairly standard. The formulas are well worked out now, the character roles fairly simple, and there isn’t much room for change. Just a few variations upon a theme driven deep into the cultural psyche. When you get one that really tries to do something new within its generic limits and conventions, you find a text that is intriguing and, if executed well, better than it has any right to be.
Talk To Me is of this ilk. The setup is fairly conventional, with teens engaging in a game/ritual of being temporarily possessed by dark spirits by holding onto the hand of a dead medium. Things go wrong, we have constant possession, hallucination, demonic stuff, attempts to rectify the mistakes made as a result of transgressing clear warning signs, insert the plot of a thousand movies since the seventies here.
And yet, Talk To Me doesn’t quite follow all the regular beats. There are enough there, for sure, but all of them are turned up just an extra notch. The scene which ends act 1 features one of the most brutal scenes of possessed violence of recent times, which makes one genuinely squirm in the seat. Character moments are genuinely touching and then heartbreaking, made all the better by good performances from its main cast which often make even croaky-voiced possession scenes work (a notoriously tricky thing to do; acting evil is often more likely to promote laughter than goosebumps).
The film additionally makes the decision to play up the surrealism moments by not simply having random hallucinations, but playing with blocking and lighting and direction in a way the more conventional take on this film might shun. This Elm Street twisting of reality, where it isn’t clear where the real world fades into the phantasmagorical, is handled sublimely.
Australia has been trying this spin for many years now. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is an obvious point of reference, but 2020’s Relic, directed by Natalie Erika James, is also a stunning recent entry in surreal horror from Australia, the final act of that film being one massive metaphor for the themes of the story. Both of these films also have a deep theme of loss and grief (this is Kent’s whole stick, with her 2019 film The Nightingale and even her directed episode of Cabinet of Curiosities deeply soaked in tragedy), and this more emotional focus helps make Talk To Me more than just the sum of its conventional parts.
There’s a lot of time spent getting into the film, but once it gets going, it forges a new identity within a slew of similar films, standing head and shoulders above them. It’s nothing fundamentally different, but it pushes just enough buttons correctly to be more memorable than most hitting the big screens in recent times.
Rating: 7/10
Review by Kieran Judge
Socials: kjudgemental
Thanks for checking out this review. Please remember to leave a like, drop a comment, share it, and follow the blog for more content.
KJudgeMental 