Talk to Me

Grade: B

Talk to Me is another vivacious, compelling work from A24, who in the past year alone have given us X, Pearl, You Hurt My Feelings, Beau Is Afraid, The Whale, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and our Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All At Once. New directors Danny and Michael Philippou are adept at keeping what could be a rote experience fresh. Jump scares are inserted in sneaky, creative, unexpected places, and vice versa. Sometimes I braced myself for one, only to get silence.

The star, Sophie Wilde (who also has a “based on a concept by” writing credit), is a wonderful find with so much range, who deserves a long career. She can convincingly play sweet, approachable, and scary. There’s a fun scene where she and another character are belting out the chorus to Sia’s “Chandelier” while driving at night. If you’re not familiar with that song, you should be. This may be one of those cases where a song’s inclusion in a movie puts it on the map.

Wilde plays Mia, a high schooler in Australia. Her friends have a pastime at parties where they take turns shaking hands with a ceramic hand, similar to a Monkey’s Paw. The person holding hands with the hand speaks the movie’s namesake phrase, then immediately hallucinates a spirit. They then say “I let you in,” and become possessed by it. The spectators in the room cut this off after 90 seconds by pulling the hand away and blowing out a candle, which releases the ghost, bringing the person back to their body.

Sounds horrific, right? I wouldn’t do it. But it apparently gives the kids an amazing buzz, which is why they continue participating in it. There’s a montage, set to upbeat music, where we see them individually leave reality. It reminded me of the medical students in Flatliners who got addicted to dying for a couple minutes at a time – then they wonder what happens if you go a little bit longer next time, then a little bit longer, then a little bit longer… One night, Mia believes that a friend has become possessed by the spirit of her late mother, and let’s just say there are good reasons for that 90 second limit.

There are some interesting avenues that Talk to Me could have gone down, but disappointingly doesn’t. Not every subplot gets a resolution. One, in particular, gets dangled in front of us for the whole movie, only to have no obvious answer or payoff. But Talk to Me is a skillfully made, easily digestible, entertaining, racially diverse bit of summer horror. It ends on a note of sinister humor that brings everything full circle.

Grade: B