Mia’s life (Sophie Wilde) is a nightmare. She recently buried her mother, her mental health is shaky, her classmates think she’s weird, and her ex left her for her friend. But Mia has Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and her younger brother (Joe Bird), who would also like to distance themselves, but their conscience won’t allow it. Mia convinces Jade to go to a house party where friends jokingly use an ancient witchcraft hand to let demons into themselves and post the videos online. Are they really flirting with the other world or are they just kidding? So Mia, to impress the company, decides on an otherworldly experience, goes through all the nightmares of hell, and… is satisfied. The guys get involved in conversations with the dead, until one day the 90-second contact rule is broken and the spirit remains among the living.
It seems that all new breakthrough horrors are following the same path: studio bosses turn up their noses at the script, and then bite their elbows when the film becomes a sensation. So the recent “Barbarian”, before hitting the box office, traveled from door to door for years until it found funding. With “Talk to Me” it’s even more interesting, newcomers Danny and Michael Philippou got tired of waiting for fat checks and made the film themselves, later selling it to A24. In producer language, this is called fatality.
A rejected script is not the only trend in new generation horrors, now almost every genre film focuses on the theme of mental health (“Smile”, “Resurrection” and so on). And there is nothing wrong with drawing attention to the problem, although in the case of “Talk to Me” the rehashing of trauma seems to be getting boring. Mia mourns her mother, who either died by accident or left this life intentionally. Flirting with the other world, the heroine establishes contact with her and clings to this connection until the very end. Too obvious symbolism in the form of a knocked-down kangaroo (the film is still Australian), whose suffering Mia flatly refused to stop in the opening scene, will work as that gun on the wall. “Talk to Me” would have been fine without such excesses, which slightly overload the plot. The public is still hungry for good old-fashioned meat grinders without philosophical preludes, although the superpower of the Philippou’s brainchild is that the film would have worked in both cases.
The film is mercilessly zoomer, in the best sense. The kids are no longer afraid of ghosts and do not try to find Tony Todd in the basement of the morgue to tell them how to get rid of a terrible curse. Like all normal people in 2023, the characters post videos on TikTok at the slightest opportunity, look the dead in the eye, and go to the front line in the other world just out of interest, or maybe out of boredom. When the situation gets out of control, what begins is probably the scariest on-screen spectacle since Austin Butler’s performance in an Elvis Presley suit last year. The Philippou brothers don’t even resort to jumpscares, they gradually normalize the disturbing situation to a comfortable temperature, and then grab the viewer’s nerves with their bare hands and knock everything living out of them. Never before have demons sucking toes and the Crazy Frog melody been so creepy. Consider this film an appeal to the lawsuit that horror films have ceased to be scary.