Talk to Me: Film Review
I had been hearing rave reviews of Talk to Me for months so I expected incredible things and I do not get the hype.
The Australian horror, directed by Danny and Michael Philippou, follows Mia (Sophie Wilde) and her friends Jade (Alexandra Jensen), Riley (Joe Bird) and Daniel (Otis Dhanji). They attend a seance involving an embalmed hand, confident that is all a silly hoax. Anybody can use the hand to speak to spirits or go one step further and allow a ghost to possess them for a brief amount of time. Naturally, one of these encounters goes very wrong and a person is possessed by the spirit a bit too long…
I have seen so many reactions calling Talk To Me “terrifying” that I braced myself for the worst as I’m a scaredy cat. I know horror is subjective but I didn’t find it that scary as a whole. Don’t get me wrong – the seance scenes are pretty nerve-wracking because you don’t know what’s coming next. Plus, there are two particularly horrifying sequences that had me audibly gasping and watching through my fingers. They are brutal, bloody and shocking and I can replay them both clearly in my mind because they are so memorable.
However, the film lost me after it moved away from the seances and became more about Mia’s mental state, her trauma and her experience with grief. She starts to see spirits and it’s not clear if they are genuinely there or a figment of her imagination. They are still creepy and there is a decent level of dread and tension but it just didn’t work as effectively as the impressive first act.
The ending seems to be quite a divisive one too. While I found it surprising and clever during my first watch, I thought about it some more and felt like it was quite the cop-out. Going that route certainly ends the movie with a bang but at the same time, it leaves us with so many questions. It almost felt like the Philippous didn’t know how to tie it all up in a logical and satisfying way so they went for a stunt rather than a real resolution.
Wilde is terrific at playing the grieving young woman slowly losing the plot. I just wish I cared more about Mia. I don’t know if it’s because she wasn’t written well enough or because I lacked sympathy for anyone stupid enough to use the embalmed hand. Performance-wise, I was also impressed with Bird’s terrifying turn and Miranda Otto as Jade and Riley’s no-nonsense mother. She is hilarious and written really well.
Talk to Me is a solid horror with a few standout scary moments but it’s a shame the second half pales in comparison to the first.
In cinemas Friday 28th July