Talk To Me: Familiar-ish But Freaky Horror

For better or worse, the Philippou Brothers and A24's 2022 horror flick "Talk To Me" is probably the most conventional and safe film I've seen put out by the studio. It just simply does not share a lot of the riskier artistic trademarks that A24 projects usually have and has a lot of underlying tropes and strategies in common with other popular horror outings like "Hereditary" and "The Exorcist." This is a good and a bad thing. It's good because this movie can act as something of a stepping stone into the world of A24 cinema for audiences that are less familiar with the studio, and bad because it means that this movie is too often more of the same. That said, I liked this movie, even if it might not be as creative as it could have been, and even though it does deal with supernatural possession, a subject that doesn't really fly all that well in religious circles. The artistic merits of the film are certainly there, and while this isn't a movie I would recommend to families, to say nothing of believing families, it's a movie I wanted to talk about on my blog because it made an impact on me, and also for the sake of continuing my A24 stint. So, that said, I want to talk to you about Talk To Me.

Talk To Me follows Mia, a teenager, and her group of friends as they discover how to conjure spirits with an embalmed hand, and proceed to get addicted to the experience. Eventually, things go horribly wrong, and the group is thrown into an unfamiliar situation, forced to deal with powers they don't fully understand.

I like to think of Talk To Me as something of an exercise in audio and visual elements, and what an exercise it is. This movie can be absolutely disorienting to watch, and in a cinematic world like this one, that's a good thing. This movie is trying to create something of a sense of powerlessness, and so a lot of the more eccentric and unhinged cinematography tricks accomplish this by throwing us, the viewer, into a sense of complete and utter disorientation. The film's occasional use of on-beat music that corresponds with what we see on screen gives me the impression that the people editing this film had a good time doing it because this movie is cool to watch. It's visually and audio-wise incredibly sharp and smart, and these aspects serve the story the movie is trying to tell very well. As far as the writing aspects of the movie go, the writing is incredibly tight and never wastes time trying to emulate lengthy Scorsese or Coppola runtimes in an attempt to look impressive when you search for it on Google. The movie gradually raises its stakes effectively, never letting the story become stale for even a second. They say that good movies are supposed to move and Talk To Me took this memorandum to heart because, boy, does this movie move.

To bounce off of that particular tangent, I do want to say that this movie has a very effective hook. A good movie is going to try to grab your attention as soon as it possibly can as originally and shockingly as it possibly can, and the more unpredictable and original the hook, the better. Oh, and a good hook also needs to fill us in on what exactly is at stake in this world. The opening scene of Talk To Me does all of these things, and it does them in spectacular fashion. From the opening scene, it was like the hand this movie centers around had grabbed me, and throughout, it never let me go because the opening was shocking, yes, but it was also smart, effective, and unusual. Talk To Me has moments where it truly is an intelligent film, and while it can sometimes think it's smarter and better than it actually is, that's not to say that it's a bad movie. Quite the opposite. I'm just saying it's not as inventive as it thinks it is, and this does tend to detract from the overall experience of watching it. On that note, I do need to once again bring up the fact that Talk To Me is probably the most disappointingly conventional A24 film I've seen so far, and it lacks a lot of the unusual tactics that I am looking for when I watch an A24 movie. And while this may just be more up to my personal preferences than anything else, I'm bringing this up to let you know that it's a much more mainstream movie than you might expect, and I just want to make sure I'm managing expectations well. But yes, Talk To Me does have a twist ending, and that was a welcome story beat.

Speaking of the twist ending, it hits really hard. I don't want to delve into it too deeply for obvious reasons, but I can't really think of many other ways I would have rather seen this movie end. The ending for Talk To Me is incredibly intelligent and unexpected, and one of the better conclusions to a movie I've seen this year. That's all I'll say about it, though. Now, for all of this movie's somewhat annoying attempts to force empathy for the characters through trauma that doesn't necessarily feel earned or needed for a film like this one, I must say that it was nice to see a horror film that seemed to genuinely care about the characters it was portraying on-screen, rather than just using them as punching bags for whatever malevolent entity the horror writers have come up with this time. Now, it's not a perfect film, and I don't know if I want to call it one of my favorite A24 movies due to its relative lack of imagination, even if its writing might be of higher quality than other films put out by the company, but it's for sure a good movie, and I don't want to push people away from it just because it might not be as unique as it could have or even should have been. Now, on that note, Talk To Me is a film about possession by spirits, and I think that the heavy spiritual overtones of this movie should give my fellow believers some pause because, as we know, the spiritual realm is all too real and not just pure fantasy put out by filmmakers with overactive imaginations. This movie can be freaky, and will probably frighten younger viewers a good deal, even if the relatively regular atmosphere of the movie might not be as oppressive as, say, Longlegs or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That said, the movie never glamorizes the idea of possession and is a very clear warning against it, but I think that whether you give Talk To Me a watch should ultimately come down to your own sensitivities and whether or not you feel comfortable taking the hand that A24 has extended to you.

Talk To Me - 8/10

1 Peter 5:8-9