The Philippou brothers bring an eerie style, create a realistic depiction of middle income working class Australia community filled with lived in performances in their debut horror film “Talk to Me”. However, they are undone completely by the baffling motivations and decisions by the central characters that cause the audience to lose empathy and bleeds the film of its tension and suspense.
Sophie Wilde plays Mia. Mia has recently lost her mother and has been spending a lot of time with her best friend Jade and Jade’s little brother Riley. Jade and Riley live with a single mother played by Mirando Otto. Otto gives the movie a really grounded exhausted single mother performance that recalled the great Australian horror film “The Babadook”.
Within this universe there is a bizarre new teenage fad where kids grip a spooky ceramic hand and say “Talk to Me” followed by “I let you in”. This allows a spirit or ghost to possess your body. If you don’t blow out the ceremonial candle after 90 seconds the spirits may not go. The possessions are realistic with facial disfigurement and inflated pupils. The teenagers stand in a circle energetically capturing the event on their phones and having fun.
Mia is a bit of a misfit with the local kids. At a small party when the host asks for volunteers Mia steps up, gets tied down and invites the spirit into her body. For some reason, everyone who does this gets a rush. The teenagers go around the room taking turns. The allegory for drug use is admirable, but it really strains credulity that anybody would be excited and get a rush about losing control of their body to a spirit or ghost. Particularly when you see the ghosts in the room and they are quite frightening and uninviting. No Patrick Swayze from “Ghost” here. By this point I was eye rolling. When Jade makes a decision to leave a party and her little brother over an argument, and Mia makes a fateful decision that puts him in mortal danger, I was completely disengaged by anything that came after.
While the film is effectively creepy, the manipulative unrealistic decisions of the characters within the script makes them so unempathetic and you lose interest in their fate. It’s like watching a teenager jump from 100 feet into a rock covered lake. Maybe not a good idea and hard to feel sorry if it doesn’t’ end well.
That being said the performances are uniformly realistic, and Sophie Wild is fantastic in the lead having to cover the gambit of emotions and vulnerability. While she is sympathetic, the script betrays her with selfish and unrealistic decisions. Aaron Mclisky’s cinematography creates an effective dark gloomy tone and the movie is spliced together well in a classic horror film way.
All of this ends up being a missed opportunity. If Philippou would have taken one more crack at the script and been honest with its characters and motivations, created a stronger more grounded inciting incident they may have had an instant classic with their directorial debut. While they do create a spooky atmosphere and inspired great performances “Talk to me” ends up being a frustrating miss.