Rating: R | Runtime: 95 minutes
Release Date: July 27th, 2023 (Australia) / July 28th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Ahi Films / A24
Director(s): Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou
Writer(s): Danny Philippou & Bill Hinzman / Daley Pearson (concept)

They’ll want to stay.

I love a horror film that understands its concept can be enough. We don’t need to know where the supposedly ceramic-dipped embalmed hand came from or why it works beyond a quick passage of dialogue positing that the rumors say it was once the hand of a psychic medium who spoke to the dead. That’s enough to make what it does make sense. Enough to let the nightmarish potential of playing with such an object unfold as unapologetically brutal as possible.

That’s exactly what directors Danny Philippou (who co-wrote with Bill Hinzman from a concept by Daley Pearson) and Michael Philippou do with Talk to Me. They create a troubled and haunted character in Sophie Wilde’s Mia to be a wild card of a bridge who’s so desperate to want to speak to the dead that she’ll risk throwing out the rules to do so. Enter her facilitators (Zoe Terakes’ Hayley and Chris Alosio’s Joss) and her victims (Alexandra Jensen’s Jade and Joe Bird’s Riley) to push her to the brink of sanity once evil is in her ear.

The special effects and make-up is fantastic as every “spirit” who finds the candlelight to sit down and wait for a curious teenager to “let them in” and possess their body is memorably grotesque. The camerawork is kinetic. The dreams are intense. And the ability to wield hope as a weapon against salvation rather than for it is perfectly woven throughout the script. Because Mia hopes her mother didn’t commit suicide two years ago. She hopes whatever door they opened to the afterlife can be closed. She hopes no one else must die. But that belief can also kill.

Couple that nihilistic slant wherein faith becomes a tool for evil to undo good with a desire to let the characters’ actions dictate the plot rather than the other way around and you get an effective thriller that’s unafraid to embrace the darkness of its premise and the notion that happy endings aren’t happy for everyone. This is about sacrifice and reconciling what being “alone” means between the physical and emotional states of existence. It’s about understanding that the truth will never hurt more than the pain wrought by a stubborn desire to hold onto lies instead.

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Sophie Wilde in TALK TO ME; photo by Matthew Thorne; courtesy of A24.