Children shouldn’t play with useless issues: not simply the title of a low-budget American horror from 1972 however phrases to reside by, particularly on this unnerving and extremely efficient Midnight entry from Australia. But although it employs some acquainted tropes — high-schoolers dabble within the occult and quickly start to want they hadn’t, Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou’s movie Talk to Me does try to do one thing new with an outdated concept, for one factor making the crossing of infernal thresholds look like an terrible lot of enjoyable.
From the beginning, essentially the most hanging factor is that there’s not a lot in the way in which of a preamble and little or no lip service to style traditions. The Philippous are respectful sufficient of recent audiences to know that everyone is aware of now the place the ethical line is, so as an alternative of the normal setup — traditionally, a creepy, drunken outdated man yelling, “Stay away from Camp Crystal Lake” — they begin with a micro-movie, during which a teen turns as much as a drunken occasion to search for his brother. The brother is having what appears to be a psychotic episode, and, to the horror of the opposite partygoers, stabs his brother within the chest and himself within the face. It’s brutal and fast, serving as an apt overture to the principle motion, however will later show extra vital to the narrative than it first appears.
Immediately, the main target switches to 17-year-old Mia (Sophie Wilde), who continues to be wrestling along with her mom’s demise. Locked out emotionally by her father, Mia appears to her greatest buddy Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and her heat, affectionate household for assist. The extra rebellious of the 2 women, Mia persuades Jade to affix her at a séance of kinds, the place a candle is lit, friends take the embalmed, disembodied hand of a useless psychic (or is it a Satanist?) and say the phrases that give the movie its title: “Talk to me.” Footage of those occasions have been going viral for some time, sending contributors into glassy-eyed convulsions, so why do they proceed? Because the Philippous painting these possessions as a excessive, leaving Mia “glowing” relatively than freaked out after her first attempt.
As in all teen-themed horrors, there may be an undercurrent of sexual pressure right here, notably in the truth that Mia’s ex, Daniel, is now courting Jade. But for these questioning the place these movies can go subsequent within the age of #MeToo, the Philippous have a reasonably good reply: the place the reactionary slashers of the ’70s and ’80s exploited their younger viewers’s urge for food for intercourse and successfully punished them for it, Talk to Me is a considerate try to determine what actually frightens youngsters right this moment. In Mia’s case, it’s her mom’s demise, which more and more appears like suicide, and her drift into the spirit world displays each her want for closure and her fears for the long run (in distinction to Mia’s energetic peer group, the apparitions she sees are rotting, blackened, and oozing goo from pustulant sores).
After an admirably well-ratcheted build-up, the rollercoaster lastly plunges when Jade’s little brother Riley (Joe Bird) tags alongside to one among these “possession parties”, and all hell breaks unfastened in a fantastically gory eruption of violence that sees the 13-year-old smashing his face into each out there floor. In the mayhem that follows, sure guidelines of gate-keeping are forgotten — every session should final now not than 90 seconds, and the candle should be extinguished instantly after — and it turns into more and more probably that the porous wall between the residing and the useless has been breached.
As is commonly the case with Australian horror, the filmmakers persist with their weapons all through, which signifies that, as an alternative of neatly wrapping issues up in a last-minute sell-out, the ending is admirably darkish (with echoes of the unique 1992 Candyman). There is a way, nonetheless, that this will probably not be the tip. After all, we solely see one embalmed hand, and, as one character sagely notes, “The other one’s out there… somewhere.”
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