Communing With the Dead Just to Feel Alive

Photo: A24

A24 has a reputation for being a bastion of art-house horror, thanks to its ties to Ari Aster and Robert Eggers and releases like It Comes at Night and Saint Maud. But the company’s latest find, the Australian movie Talk to Me, is gratifyingly quick to the chase, skipping a slow burn in favor of a premise with an easy simplicity. A figurine has been kicking around the teenage scene in suburban Australia — one that supposedly grants the ability to communicate with the dead. This otherworldly object has the shape of an outstretched hand and is creepy while also looking like something you might find in the sale section at Urban Outfitters. Its current owners claim that beneath the ceramic is the embalmed limb of a medium or a satanist, but no one knows if this is true or cares all that much. What matters is that the thing works — if you clasp it and say “talk to me,� you see what appears to be a ghost, and if you add, “I let you in,� the ghost will take over your body until someone else pries the statuette out of your grasp. There are other rules involving a candle and ensuring the possession doesn’t last for longer than 90 seconds, but the characters see the hand’s powers as an unparalleled party trick rather than as an exact science. Proof of an afterlife? Sure, but more than anything, it’s tremendous content.

In fact, the first time we see someone in the grip of the hand, it’s on the screen of a phone belonging to Mia (Sophie Wilde), though her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) thinks the video’s fake. Danny and Michael Philippou, Talk to Me’s directors, would know, given that they cut their teeth running a 6.74 million–subscriber strong YouTube channel infamous for wild stunts and DIY effects. Their feature-film debut is, in comparison, an impressively slick piece of work, one that puts thought into how the movement of the camera reflects Mia’s increasing disorientation after a rowdy supernatural session. But they’re still button-pushers at heart, as becomes clear whenever the ghosts are involved — possession, it turns out, is tremendously fun when you’re young enough to be convinced that you yourself will never die. The scenes with the hand are the movie’s best, with its cool-kid owners Joss (Chris Alosio) and Hayley (Zoe Terakes) ringleading friends through rounds of supernatural experimentation as though they were all peer-pressuring each other into doing keg stands. When in control of a spirit, people’s pupils become vast black pools, voices turn creaky, and behavior becomes totally unpredictable, and while it’s eerie, it does seem harmless enough until Jade’s kid brother Riley (Joe Bird) begs for a turn and Mia pushes for him to get one.

The trouble with Mia is that to her, unlike her peers, death is real. Her mother, Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen), was found dead two years earlier in the family home from an overdose of pills, and Mia is in deep denial about the fact that it doesn’t seem to have been an accident. Remaining estranged from her father Max (Marcus Johnson), she’s become a surrogate member of Jade’s family — Miranda Otto is entertaining as the all-seeing matriarch — though Jade herself has been pulling away and focusing on a new relationship with a mutual friend named Daniel (Otis Dhanji). Wilde plays her character as a grinning goofball who’s trying hard to seem normal. But in her scenes with Jade, whom she tries to cling to, and Daniel, who was once her childhood sweetheart, there’s a yearning desperation that makes others pull away. It’s of course the possibility of contacting her mother that leads Mia to break through the barely-there guide rails the others have established and to let the spirits into her life.

Talk to Me has some solid scares and a particularly gnarly sequence involving a possession gone wrong, but it also has an understated ambivalence about the devices the characters are quick to hold up as soon as anything noteworthy looks like it might be happening. Its opening scene, a long tracking shot following a guy named Cole (Ari McCarthy) through a raucous house party to retrieve his distressed brother, finds the pair emerging from a back room to a wall of camera-phone flashes turned their way. Mia retreats into her phone for comfort instead of reaching out to her father, watching videos not just of her mom, but of closer days with Jade. When Daniel French-kisses a dog while under the control of an amorous ghost, the first thing he does when released is beg for everyone to delete the video. The film isn’t so unhip as an anti-tech treatise, but it does understand tech as a vector for teen isolation and posturing and regards it with a resignation that’s interesting, coming from two people who made a name for themselves online. Talk to Me doesn’t quite have something pointed to say about it, or anything else, but that’s okay — it’s just here to show you a good time and then usher itself out before overstaying its welcome.