Talk to Me (2022)
Director(s): Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Writer(s): Danny Philippou, Bill Hinzman, Daley Pearson
Starring: Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen, Joe Bird
It’s always nice to see how horror evolves with the culture/technology but even more interesting on exactly how it incorporates into the plot itself. You could go the easy route and be very direct and literal, for example, at the advent of home video game culture, you saw an uptick of cheesy (some in the best kind of ways) flicks of video games come to life slaughtering people by the masses but some are a bit more nuanced that actually shows you the impact of how modern culture is the direct catalyst to spread demonic chaos and that my fiendish friends, is pretty much how we get to the gem that is, Talk to me.
What I appreciate about this flick is how something so dangerous as conjuring the dead could have been a huge nothing if it weren’t for the fact that we live in a time where we constantly crave entertainment in the form of clicking on something for the next dopamine rush (speaking of which, feel free to forward this article to all your friends so they may CLICK on the link to support this site! Hee hee hee). The movie does well to address the current state of our society by taking the premise of social media internet clip culture and using it as a vehicle to tell a story about how interacting with the dead can become “viral” and cool so that everyone is seeking it out for a good time. To be clear, although one may think I’m taking a judgmental, BOOMER-like tone with this entry so far, I would TOTALLY be the first to attend one of these things if it were real. It would be a big HELL NO for me on trying it myself, but I wouldn’t mind being a wallflower in witnessing some spooky/scary stuff go down, I mean, what kind of FearTastic Vault master would I be if I didn’t report back to you freaks if the stories were legit?!
The premise is simple enough; when one grabs this severed, embalmed hand and says the magic words, “I let you in,” you become a conduit for the dead for 90 seconds until a candle is blown out and the spirit leaves your body. While you’re possessed however, this is where the spooky fun is had and the spirit can say and do all sorts of kooky stuff in front of the audience which is prime fodder for clickbait and thus, how this stuff goes crazy on the interweb. Of course, it’s only fun when things are done the right way and we wouldn’t really have much of a movie if things only went right so let’s talk about when things go wrong, shall we? Enter our main character, Mia; a gal who is grieving the recent death of her mother, along with her best friend Jade and Jade’s brother Riley. This trio ends up at a party where the hand takes the main stage and of course, things do not go as planned and now the spirits that were called out, are not exactly ready to leave when asked (even politely!).
Without going into spoiler territory, this flick has some excellent cinematography on how it conveys the spirit world; every creator in the horror realm has their take on the afterlife when it comes up but the way this flick views the in-between, purgatory, or whatever you want to call it is downright depressing and terrifying at the same time. It’s to the point where I remember asking myself after watching the flick if I would prefer final judgement over limbo based on how it was portrayed in this flick because the psychology of how being stuck on Earth is portrayed alone is quite maddening. Although there are some moments of jump scares in this flick, what really captures the audience is more of the creepy factor of what these spirits that I assume are always around us are constantly doing without us even realizing it because again, they are stuck in this in-between state of the afterlife.
Another great point to make is that from what I understand, the directors of this flick were successful content creators, RackaRacka that focused on horror-comedy and practical effect-heavy sketches. Knowing this, I clicked on their page IMMEDIATELY and watched a handful of their vids and yeah, it makes me like this flick even more, knowing that these folks came from making such fun vids (check out the one with Ronald McDonald hahaha) that somehow translated into making full length horror flicks in Hollywood! Cheers to Danny and Michael Philippou and to their success!
Life is FAR more interesting when we take interest in things that scare us.