By
A.A. Dowd
“Talk to Me has a superb first hour, a tingling escalation that pays off with a set-piece for the ages.”
Pros
- A terrific party-trick premise
- A terrific younger solid
- One actually terrifying sequence
Cons
- Some clunky plotting
- Peaks within the center
- “It’s really about grief”
The monkey’s paw is so final century. Talk to Me, a freaky blast of city legend for the age of social media and smartphones, introduces a brand new cursed object of phalangeal horror. It’s a hand, severed and embalmed and encased in ceramic, that acts as a direct conduit to the world of the lifeless. Grasping and addressing its digits (the phrases of the movie’s title are the required incantation) summons a specter from the opposite facet. Four extra phrases, “I let you in,” grant consent for possession. For nonetheless lengthy the handshake holds, your physique stays below the management of the visiting spirit, benevolent or much less so.
The premise is pure campfire hokum, however there’s a fiendishly intelligent twist to it: Rather than strategy the facility of that creepy hand with nothing however worry or hushed curiosity, the Australian suburban youngsters of this A24 fright-fest flip it into a celebration trick. Gathering in basements on Friday nights, the youngsters take turns communing and trifling with the lifeless; they convulse right into a marionette state, their voices commandeered for a beyond-the-grave ventriloquist act, as their classmates bellow with laughter and movie the entire thing. They don’t want an exorcist. They want a chaperone or a stricter curfew.
For Mia (Sophie Wilde), the draw of the sport is deeper than a wild out-of-body expertise. She’s nonetheless grieving the dying of her mom, who just lately overdosed on sleeping tablets — possibly by chance, possibly not. Could the hand be a means to attain her? Feeling disconnected from her father (Marcus Johnson), Mia spends most of her time hanging with longtime pal Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and Jade’s preteen brother, Riley (Joe Bird), who appears equally spooked and intrigued by the blithe conjurings the older youngsters are turning into viral content material.
The movie’s administrators, Aussie twins Danny and Michael Philippou, rigorously set up this surrogate-family dynamic, discovering affection (there’s a fantastic smash lower to a Sia singalong that instantly conveys Mia and Riley’s shut bond) but additionally buried tensions, just like the whisper of jealousy that has come between the ladies since Jade began courting Daniel (Otis Dhanji), the painfully chaste Christian boy Mia referred to as sweetheart in center faculty. The Philippou brothers made a reputation for themselves with the horror-comedy of their YouTube channel, RackaRacka. Their internet-celeb goofiness seeps productively into the high-school hangout scenes of their function debut. If nothing else, the 2 have a finger on the heart beat of a era dwelling life by the oblong body of a display.
But Talk to Me is not any didactic lecture about youngsters as of late. The movie faucets into one thing extra timeless: the video games of rooster, delicate and harmful, the younger have at all times performed with mortality. The hand is sort of a extra excessive model of the blackout problem (a.okay.a. the fainting sport), that adolescent double-dare pastime of asphyxiation for the sake of euphoria. It additionally turns into a funhouse mirror of odd teenage experimentation with medication: What are the youngsters doing in that basement however discovering an outlandish means to chase sensation and turn out to be another person for a short while? “When you’re young, you’re immortal, or so you think,” a poet of rock ‘n’ roll as soon as mentioned.
It most likely goes with out saying that Talk to Me will finally make the specter of dying far more fast for these youngsters, tilting out of carefree transgression and into dire consequence; the expertly calibrated jolt of the chilly open, a earlier occasion gone flawed, tells us that from the beginning. But realizing the shoe goes to drop doesn’t make its touchdown any much less stunning. The centerpiece sequence of the film is harrowingly intense — an outburst of violence that remembers, in its ugly mutilation and insanity, the ending of Stephen King’s unforgettable quick story “The Jaunt.” The scene sends an electrical present of hazard by the film, destroying any sense of safety. How a lot horror, you marvel, continues to be on the way in which?
Maybe not fairly sufficient, because it seems. Talk to Me has an outstanding first hour, a tingling escalation that pays off with a set piece for the ages. But from there it settles into one thing slightly extra standard and so much much less convincing. Part of the issue is that the script by Danny and Bill Hinzman begins fudging the ooky-spooky logistics, permitting the hostile spirits to seem at will, impersonate family members, and create misleading hallucinations — a skillset that proves extra narratively handy than significantly scary. There’s additionally the way in which Talk to Me will get hopelessly hung up on Mia’s unprocessed emotions about her mom. That aspect by no means stops trying insert-trauma-here perfunctory, possibly as a result of it’s quick calcified into cliché for horror motion pictures below the A24 umbrella.
The movie is at its finest earlier, in that basement, teetering together with its characters on the knife’s edge between scared and amused. Each time they invite the ghosts in, the film shudders with potential. Who will step by the door and into their pores and skin this time? The younger actors, particularly the beamingly emotive Wilde, embrace the role-playing alternative. If Talk to Me doesn’t peak with its large second of bloody terror, it does so with a giddy occasion montage that makes ghostly possession appear to be a sport of musical chairs. Here, the film actually communicates what it’s about: dancing with the reaper earlier than, to paraphrase one other ’70s rock sage, you’ve realized to worry him.
Talk to Me opens in choose theaters on Friday, July 28. For extra of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please go to his Authory web page.
Editors’ Recommendations
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Talk to Me’s ending, defined
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Slash/Back evaluate: The youngsters are all proper (particularly when combating aliens)
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God’s Creatures evaluate: a very restrained Irish drama
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Who Invited Them evaluate: thoughts video games, homicide, and mayhem
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Me Time evaluate: Netflix’s newest comedy falls aside
A.A. Dowd, or Alex to his mates, is a author and editor primarily based in Chicago. He has held employees positions at The A.V. Club and…
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…. to be continued
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