Jaxon Safian's Film Reviews

The directorial debut of Michael and Danny Philippou, Talk To Me, is a crowd pleaser of the best sort. Supernatural horror is very in, and the currentness and relatability of the script paired with its fresh-but-secretly-not-fresh concept is makes for a film that feels, though not at all topical, exceptionally well-timed. Parallels will be drawn to Hereditary (as is true of most all horror movies these days, it’s become the gold standard), but I think Talk To Me has much more in common thematically with It Follows: both are about teenage girls betrayed by party culture whose past trauma interferes with their ability to do the right thing. Where It Follows was derivative, however, Talk To Me is anything but, constructed of setpieces that use our expectations of horror beats to unsettle the audience rather than shock them. At its best, the movie explores its rich character relationships while tentatively worldbuilding. At its worst, namely in the later scenes with Mia’s father, Talk To Me feels like a carbon copy studio horror, using predictable jumpscare filler scenes to exposit and kill off no-longer-important characters for no reason other than that death is exciting. 

The ending’s effectiveness is two-edged: after nearly killing her surrogate-little-brother under the influence of malicious spirits, protagonist Mia dies and finds herself as a trapped spirit, in the same purgatory as those who had haunted her. In terms of the horror worldbuilding, it gives a satisfying conclusion while leaving the circumstances of the supernatural mysterious. On the other hand, in terms of the characters, it really drops the ball. Though Mia’s story is completed, the movie ultimately isn’t about Mia, but about how her actions affect those around her, and we don’t get to see the long-term consequences of her actions (past the expressions on the faces of a few background characters in a rushed denouement). Frankly, and this is generally my opinion when it comes to low-stakes ensemble horror, more people should have died. I realize that statement is at odds with my earlier claim that it is bad to kill off characters solely for the shock of their death, but here lies an exception; at the beginning of the third act, a bunch of main characters straight up dip out of the movie. These were some of the characters we saw impacted by Mia’s actions, and they got away fairly unscathed. It would have raised the emotional conflict and made Mia’s descent more believable and effective if they had died, or at least been somewhat scarred by her selfish fuckage. Again, this is a story about a girl who is flawed and thereby makes mistakes because of a tumultuous past, and she only does one really bad thing before she’s totally possessed. As a result, it feels as if she is being punished severely for what is shown to be a reasonable though deeply inconsiderate transgression – a single mistake. It makes her arc frustrating rather than cathartic; she’s not the problem motivating the conflict, her changing doesn’t even have any bearing on the story.

And that’s everything bad I have to say about the film! The practical effects are extremely well done, the direction is absolutely phenomenal, and the performance from lead actor Sophie Wilde is my personal favorite of the year so far. With the popularity of superhero cinematic universes slowly but surely waning due to repetitiveness and a lack of originality, audiences are craving more inventive filmmaking, and the Philippous absolutely bring the heat with their camerawork and lighting. Whip pans and symmetrical close-ups abound, feeling distinctly Anderson-y despite the morbidity and coldness, and an ultra shallow depth of field is often employed to dissociate different areas of the screen, such as in the best shot of the movie where the hand is focused on in three pieces; palm, knuckles, fingers. Low-lit (yet clearly visible!) shots are also aplenty, using candles or moonlight to shade in the character’s faces. The look, though very modern, is obviously drawn from slashers of the seventies and eighties. Many nighttime scenes were so reminiscent of Halloween that I was half-expecting Michael Myers to appear in the shadows.

This technical proficiency, rocking cast and feeling of youth both behind the camera and on the page elevate what could have been a middle-of-the-road teen horror (cough Smile cough) to a standout scarefest.