Review: TALK TO ME

A year on, Mia still hasn't recovered from her mother's suicide. She cannot connect with her father and finds warmth in her friend Jade's family. When she sees a viral video of local fellow schoolkids that claims to show possession by the dead, she persuades Jade to go with her. The ritual involves a ceramic hand covered in felt tip inscriptions, a candle and a two part invocation: "talk to me" and "I let you in." It produces hideous visions of decaying reanimated humans but it is also exhilarating as the possession creates a powerful high.

So, no contacting her mother, then, but there is that high. The next night she goes back and everyone's into it in a scene of escalating hedonism that looks like a prohibition era cocaine party. Mia even lets one of the spirits deliver a salsa vocal that plays tightly into the Latin scoring. And it's all fun and games until someone's kid brother goes too long and lashes into a frenzy of self destruction. Mia's fault. Now she's ostracised from her all but name family, young Riley is comatose with a face like aged beef and still possessed and the ghost of her mother has turned up to tell her that the story of the suicide was not what she was told. Between worlds, families, bonds and actions and everything that was ever right or wrong, Mia now really has a job to do.

This is the debut feature of twins Danny and Michael Phillipou, two YouTube stars who have ten years behind them in creating goofy, violent and delirious entertainment for a viewership that's in the millions. Not yet thirty, they pitched this story to indy label A24 who not only accepted it but let them have free rein. The pair knocked back an MCU project in favour of doing it their way. That's important.

Why? Because this does not look or act like a first feature. It certainly doesn't play like the film of young film makers. The tightly scheduled jump scares of mainstream horror are absent with only a few resorts to shock over suspense. There are myriad points of influence from cinema and literature but they are hints rather than winks. The pacing is supple, stretching here and tightening to great tension there as needed. The dialogue is naturalistic and the performances all work. It packs punches along a busy ride that also feels deep with some genuinely explored themes told through character development. And it's only 95 minutes long.

From the eye popping violence of the prologue scene to the queasy mix of laid back adolescence to the heady party scene to Riley's ultraviolent self harm to moments of thick silence, Talk to Me runs like a social drama with horror scenes. In this way it reminds me of the similarly mooded It Follows from 2014. The stories are very different but in both cases the demi monde of teenagers is treated seriously as a culture and if the solutions stray toward the naive or outright stupid it is convincingly due to their difficult navigation through the realm of ethics. Mia is credibly flawed. An early scene shows her leaving a scene of responsibility in a panic. It is her mistaken permission to Riley for him to do the ritual that lands him in hospital in this world and somewhere far worse in the other. While there are too many currents to call this a fable, Mia's decisions become forged in increasingly pressing moments.

A major departure from the teen horror template (and one that certainly distinguishes it from It Follows) is parents. There are parents in this adolescence and their presence is strong. Miranda Otto's single mum is all tough love and the thrill of embarrassing her daughter in front of her boyfriend. She also understands that Jade will make it out of the house that night whatever her mother says and is sent off with a caution. Then, later, when it's IV drips and hospital beds, she presses through the sorrow and anger of any mother in that position. Mia's father appears weak to his daughter which only fuels his sense of powerlessness and triggers Mia's visions of monstrosity and guilt. This is a teen horror flick!

Sophie Wilde's turn as Mia is committed. She is required to stretch her range from an already complex and stressed character to a range of personae through possession, growling, crooning, tempting or screaming with a physical performance to match. Yes, there is editing and effects to help her but she could have done this performance on stage. Whether loosely awkward or wracked with emotion she must carry the film on her back and she does while keeping it believable all the way through.

I can't exit this review without my gratitude to the writers and directors of this film that they might have used a lot of familiar tropes and tools of the teen or possession horror sub genres but managed to refresh them. If it is a sign of things to come in cinema that the breakthrough undercurrent comes equipped with self trained style and craft from public platforms we only need to remind ourselves of the quiet revolution that was The Blair Witch Project back in 1999 with its determined lo-fi means and genius marketing. As with that Talk to Me didn't naff out on the stuff that will keep it on screens for years to come, a well told story fashioned with the love of it.