More than the kangaroo omen lurking in the periphery, more than those distinctive vowel sounds, it’s the hand that makes Talk to Me hit differently than so much other horror of the past decade or so.
The genre is elastic and adaptable, capable of absorbing just about any sort of situation or accessory you throw at it, but this hand … this hand is something else. Part of it is the intimacy — to take part in this dialogue beyond the span of the world before us, you have to shake hands with this lightly obscene sculpture, ceramic upon plaster upon the severed hand of a cursed medium. Part of it is the proportions — it’s not exactly a hand in the way we define them. The knuckles are just a bit off, and the spread of fingers seems unusual. You know even before you accept this insane phenomenon that this isn’t a handshake on even terms. It’s like your World War II veteran relative’s voice, in your ear, insisting that every battle is won and lost depending on the impression given by the way you shake hands.
At heart, the premise is similar to Bloody Mary (or for Middle Tennessee kids, saying “I hate the Bell Witch” three times in a mirror). This is the big party game for Australia’s teens and early 20-somethings, wherein you risk great supernatural consequence to entertain your “friends” so they don’t wreck your house. But unlike Bloody Mary and its regionalized variants, when you shake hands with this mysterious construct, you actually do communicate with another realm of existence. And because of the omnipresence of smartphones, we see the trajectory of this fracture between worlds one uploaded video after another.
The first thing Talk to Me does exactly right is unfold in an interesting and smartly arranged cosmology that is tonally consistent without revealing all its secrets or spelling everything out. The second thing it does exactly right is put to bed the whole “the monster is a metaphor” school of scares that have been kicking around since Takeo Saeki murdered his wife in 2000’s Ju-on all the way up to this summer’s interesting but ultimately frustrating The Boogeyman. That’s not in any way meant to diminish the grief our heroine Mia (Sophie Wilde, in a staggering performance) is dealing with, but merely to say that Greek Australian directors Danny and Michael Philippou (and Danny’s co-writer Bill Hinzman) have seen all the same movies that we have, and this is no It Comes at Night.
In Stephen King’s nonfiction work Danse Macabre, he talks about the three different responses one can aim for in dark fiction: to horrify, to terrify and to gross out. Talk to Me does all three of these things, and expertly. But there’s even a fourth response, stretching all the way back to ancient Greek theater, when the viewer recognizes inescapable tragedy as the only possible end point — a sigh of acknowledgment that comes from some unknowable place deep within — and Talk to Me excels at that like its ’90s spiritual ancestors Candyman and In Dreams did.
Every week it seems like there’s some new hook coalescing into menacingly viral form online. Just last month, that McDonald’s promotion for Grimace’s birthday launched a mini trend in found-footage horror as well as proved that corporate resources can be channeled into creating a tulpa. The Philippou brothers come from the realm of YouTube videos, equal parts Bam Margera and creepypasta as their artistic spawning grounds, and despite their association with disgraced YouTuber Jake Paul, they’ve made one of the most auspicious horror debuts in quite some time. This is a smart and genuinely scary film that somehow found a way to make a resonant tale of consumptive sadness that also delivers upsetting body horror and realistic, quality teen performances. And this may be the best ending to a scary movie in years. (2018’s Truth or Dare comes close, but that was a weak film with a superb ending, and Talk to Me fires on all cylinders its whole brisk 95 minutes.)
There’s real emotional resonance here — a lot of modern horror doesn’t tend to hit this hard. You have to reach back to The Dead Zone or 12 Monkeys to find the films that haul off and punch you in the gut the day after you see the movie. It feels a bit lazy to invoke Lake Mungo in comparison, because all things Antipodean are not a monolith, but there’s something about when Australian horror decides not to fuck around (see also Bad Girl Boogey, an incredibly violent slasher now available via video on demand from trans filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay that also pulls no punches and unleashes a deeply resonant vision on the global genre cinema scene) that has a lingering power you can’t wriggle away from. Talk to Me is uncompromising and emotionally brutal, it’s gross and smart, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since I saw it.