Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian pranksters behind the RackaRacka YouTube channel, here deliver exactly the sort of film you wouldn’t expect. Okay, that’s not quite true.
Nobody will be surprised to hear they have made a horror film. But they certainly deviate from their earlier aesthetic with a bracingly grim take on the genre that casts an apparently disapproving scowl at adolescent irresponsibility. The characters joke. The film mostly keeps a straight face (despite what some trailers promise).
Following in a long tradition, Talk to Me features young people calling up demonic chaos at something like a seance. We are in suburban Adelaide, where Mia (Sophie Wilde), still bruised after her mother’s recent suicide, attends a house party with her pal Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and Jade’s brother, Riley (Joe Bird).
Someone produces what they allege is an embalmed hand and suggest it be used to contact the dead. Grasp its fingers, speak the words “talk to me” and you may find yourself in communion with a bloodied husk or a sobbing spirit.
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The film relies on an implicit parallel to justify a mildly implausible leap. Having seen at least one participant recoil in horror, why would a second step up to take the challenge?
The film appears to be drawing a parallel with recreational drug use but, in this case, the reward is a tad too obscure to justify the psychological risk. No matter. It is to the Philippous’ credit that events move so fast and in such eerie fashion that one scarcely finds time to process that anomaly.
After all, what horror would survive if idiots never took the candle down to the dark, scary basement from which eerie groans emerge?
Having honed their film-making through endless online pastiches, the directors know just how to time the stomach-jolting jump scares. There is forever a hand ready to grab your unsuspecting ankle.
The boys are also much at home to torrents of viscera and the odd gouged-out eye. But Talk to Me is at least as notable for its impressively nihilistic investigation of a singularly uninviting afterlife and its connection to the messy realities of contemporary suburbia.
Of course, the partygoers leap forward to shake the disembodied hand. There is the possibility of social media likes in any resulting footage. Everyone clicking may assume they’re watching a fake stunt, but that adds another layer of snark.
Sophie Wilde brings genuine poignancy to a key character who – like, say, Fr Karras in The Exorcist – winds the noisy possession in with personal grief and regret. There is often a sense in horror that supernatural mayhem follows sadness around every darkened corner, even in the backyards of South Australia.
Aaron McLisky’s camera gives us a suburbia that is grubbier, dustier and filled with greater uncertainty than the soap-opera sheen two generations of Irish TV viewers have grown up with.
It is not entirely clear how much of the messiness is intended. In the last act the rules of the haunting become increasingly hard to follow. Are the dead trying to lure the living to the other side? Are they trying to make their way among the quick? The film is in just enough control to fall over the line before those questions pull it to bloody shreds.
Indeed, the ambiguity may draw back viewers to a film that has every chance of being a big summer hit. The reliably smart A24 thought as much when the company saw Talk to Me at Sundance and held its nerve in the subsequent bidding war.
Expect a lot of money to be thrown at the Philippous in the next few years. On this evidence, they deserve the opportunity.
Talk to Me opens on Friday, July 28th
