By David Dent
Like the spectre of M R James’s story ‘Casting the Runes’ that ran through David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 movie It Follows, there’s something quite traditional at work underneath the gory shenanigans in Talk to Me, a sort of millennial retelling of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’.
A feature debut from the insanely talented Australian based Philippou twins, Danny and Michael (check out their shorts on the RackaRacka YouTube channel), Talk to Me seems to have emerged, fully formed, from nowhere. It’s the story of a group of friends, one of whom inherits, via the death of a mate, a weird carved and possibly embalmed hand that, when grasped and accompanied by the relevant spoken words, provides a terrifying and exhilarating ‘trip’ into the beyond; the catch? Only a certain amount of time is allowed in its grasp; longer traps the spirit world within the holder. Which you don’t want to do, apparently.
Central to the story is 17 year old Mia (Sophie Wilde) who has recently lost her mother, and who already occupies a twilight emotional world between her estranged, grieving father and the friends and family who have taken her under their wing. The ‘hand’ ritual is a shared experience that has gained notoriety on social media – is it real or fake? – and can only be carried out among friends (someone always needs to time the interaction, while the others – of course – need to film it on their phones). Mia’s nervousness about holding the hand echoes all those films where the ‘good’ character holds out while all around them are partying (or more accurately the ones where there’s reticence about being involved in a séance), but once she goes through with it it’s her story that we stick with (although the Philippous’ seemingly ragged but actually meticulously arranged direction also throws us off in lots of different narrative directions). It’s also the supposedly responsible Mia who is held culpable for what happens to the youngest of the group, Riley (Joe Bird) when his attempts to participate in the ritual go seriously awry.
We’ve already seen the downside of the hand, in a violent prologue which sets up Talk to Me’s tension from the get go, and there is of course an amount of inevitability about the outcome once Mia’s friends start dabbling; it’s an outcome that, when it arrives, is frequently terrifying. Like It Follows mentioned earlier, this movie is about teenage friendship and relationships as much as it is about horror. But whereas the former movie was almost slacker in its laidbackness, Talk to Me fizzes with the anarchic energy of youth and the perils of messing with the forbidden. I was also reminded of Joe Begos’s 2019 movie Bliss, which in its storytelling mixed themes from the past and the present (and desire and danger) with equally unhinged results. Brilliant.
Talk To Me is available now in UK cinemas.
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