It’s no secret we’ve been going through a renaissance of groundbreaking horror films for about a decade now, and distributor A24 has often been the tip of that spear. The latest horror film under their banner, Talk to Me does not live up to that pedigree in any way, shape, or form.
There’s a small portion of the film’s runtime toward its conclusion that stumbles into some genuinely fascinating storytelling ideas. However, the general “social media trend” premise of Talk to Me remains largely uninteresting because none of the characters are developed particularly well. This results in very little opportunity for emotional investment, making the overall experience more trite and sad than scary. In many ways, Talk to Me is what would happen if the sappy and contrived Netflix series 13 Reasons Why was firmly in the horror genre.
We follow Mia (Sophie Wilde), an Australian teenager grieving her late mother. In her grief, Mia is much more attached to her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and Jade’s little brother Riley (Joe Bird) than she is to her own family. The three of them attend a party where some local kids have brought what appears to be the hand and forearm of a mannequin, which they claim is haunted when a candle is lit nearby. Mia plays along and is briefly possessed by the hand, seeing disturbing visions of her decomposing mother. The side effects of these visions soon haunt the people she cares about most, setting up a caper which begins interestingly enough, but soon devolves into a bland soup of horror tropes.
The bright spots before the aforementioned small section of brilliance near the end are the performances of Sophie Wilde and Joe Bird. Being the two characters who are most affected by the evil spirits in this film, they have the most opportunity of anyone to showcase their range. Wilde makes Mia an incredibly sympathetic character in spite of the screenplay’s generalities. Bird is required to dig deep into Riley’s evil alter-ego, and for such a young actor, he acquits himself rather well.
Most of the film’s problems arise in its airy, boring midsection. This is where directors Danny and Michael Philippou make it abundantly clear that they haven’t done anything to make us care about their characters beyond what the actors are contributing. There’s a vague notion of exploring prejudice, but this exploration is rarely deeper than it would be in any soap opera.
I was so hoping the film would save itself from mediocrity in its final act. There’s an undeniably cool reversal there, where the audience has to guess which way is up or down in an emotional and metaphysical sense. Ultimately, the Philippou brothers don’t even do themselves justice, though. What started out promising in the first act sours by the second, and the film basically repeats this cycle once its stakes are raised late in the game.
Although Talk to Me is generally disappointing, I’m still curious to see what the Philippou brothers do next. There are enough interesting ideas on display to warrant some amount of praise. It’s not awful, considering these are first-time directors, but I think we’ve come to expect more from the A24 seal of approval. | George Napper
