Film review: Talk To Me

Talk To Me has been the talk of the horror world since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last year. A24 picked up the American distribution rights almost immediately. Some have compared it to The Exorcist and called it a Gen Z Evil Dead for its possession sequences and plot, and notched it next to Scream as a landmark in teen horror. In all of the above, it’s hard to understand why. A few brief moments aside, this Australian chiller is a mid, slow, boring movie with a good idea in the middle but zero atmosphere, tension, dread, fright, characters you actually care about, or real look into the (shallow) depths of what it’s trying to do.

It’s a decent enough starting point: a bunch of high school kids come into ownership of a weird hand with terrible properties. Light a candle, shake the hand, say “talk to me”, and you’re communicating with a dead spirit. Go a step further in this morbid Chat Roulette, and the spirit enters your body and stays there until your mates pull the magic hand from yours. Blow out the candle, and the gateway to the dead world is closed. Beware: if you die while you’re possessed, you die for real.

Predictably, things are a laugh until they aren’t. Having a party to spend the evening messing with souls from the other side, one lad gets filled with an exceptionally horny spirit and ends up making out with a dog. But after main character Mia (Sophie Wilde) has several turns, which make her feel “awesome”, and like she’s “glowing”, it all goes wrong. Her dead mother – believed to have died by suicide but now with a question mark over it – turns up, while her best friend's too-young brother has a go and gets taken over by a spirit whose favourite thing is smashing his head on the table. Mia has to traverse the two worlds to sort it all out before he dies in hospital.

The good stuff: the preference for practical special effects over the lame jump-scares by rubbish CGI ghouls with un-scary milky eyes that so much modern horror favours is welcome, as is the violence of the evil possession. But for all this, and Sophie Wilde’s obvious talent, it’s a film that struggles to draw you in. In the scenes where they’re doing the rituals, there's no atmosphere, and the kids don’t seem to care about the massive discovery they’ve made. Nor, though, are they reckless and impetuous enough with it to appear truly irresponsible, either. It’s apt that they spend most of the time while it’s all going on filming on their phones.

The origin of the hand is given the briefest of explanations, as if it’s been written in at the last minute, while the details of Mia’s own trauma are served ineffectually lukewarm, and when her father turns up as a key plot-point, it's as smooth as turning over two pages in the script at once. It’s hard to connect with her, and the lack of any development at all with the rest of the cast makes it even harder to give a toss about what happens to any of them. Ditto the mechanics of how any of it fits together. When Mia announces her plan to save the day, both their response and the way it’s framed is all so casual and shrugging that it could just be any Tuesday night.

The biggest disappointment is that after all the chat, Talk To Me is so tame and ordinary. Never mind obviously-they’re-bad-news spooky hands, you’d feel more uncomfortable and creeped-out picking up a telemarketing call.

Verdict: 2/5

Talk To Me is out now

Read this: How well would you survive in a horror movie with these rock stars?