REVIEW:
Talk To Me is new Australian horror movie that wants to be the next big, creative thing. It wants to be the next It Follows. The problem is, it’s very hard to be creative in horror. Everything is similar to something else. And so this movie ends up really just hanging one cool gimmick, that can only be taken so far.
That gimmick is the hand. It’s an embalmed hand that has now been covered in ceramic, and when a person clutches it and says “talk to me,” followed by “I let you in,” the hand grips them and possesses them. Veins runs up the persons face. Their eyes grow wide and black. It’s all pretty cool. So are the circumstances surrounding the setup of the holding the hand situation. It happens at parties, where whoever volunteers has to be tied to the chair and a timer has to set. The teenagers who watch have to stop it at ninety seconds.
So what happens after this? Well, if all goes well, then it’s over and done. After ninety seconds are up, the ghost of the hand stops possessing the person and everyone moves on. Except that one time, it lasts for more than ninety seconds, and that’s where the trouble starts. You see, there’s this girl named Mia, whose mother has died recently. She tries the hand herself and has some success. Then she gets Riley, the kid brother of her best friend, to try it.
Riley gets possessed by Mia’s mother. And wanting to talk to her mother longer, Mia keeps the hand on him for more than ninety seconds. When the hand is finally taken off Riley, it’s too late. He is demonically possessed, and starts smashing his face into a table, again and again. At this point, we are actually forty minutes in. That’s pretty cool that the movie finds a way to make the hand gimmick last that long, before finally giving us the big event. The problem is that from here, the movie doesn’t really have anywhere to go.
If Riley’s possession ends the first half, then the second half becomes about Mia being cut off. Riley’s family, including both his mother and sister, want nothing to do with Mia. And she, meanwhile, tries to uncover the truth about how her mother died, from her dad. He tells Mia that her mother committed suicide. Only Mia’s mom comes to see her (not sure how this makes sense, since it was Riley who held on too long, not Mia,) and tells her that her father is lying. This leads to some developments between Mia and her father.
At the end of the day, what we have here is a movie with a cool first half and a lousy second half. It happens all the time. There an interesting setup and premise to the movie, but no way to make it last the length of a feature film. And we are also left with a lot of unanswered questions (perhaps if the movie does well enough, one day there might be a prequel to answer them.) Where did the hand come from? How do these kids who are in possession of it know so much about it? How do they know not to let it go past ninety seconds? It doesn’t really matter that those questions aren’t answered, although if the movie had taken our characters on a journey to find out about the hand in the second half, it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting than what we got.