Who wants a hand job? Sorry, poor phrasing. I meant to ask: “Who wants to be a vessel for the dead?” C’mon, c’mon. You know you want to. Oh, the dead are feeling you all over in this li’l slice o’ Aussie Hell – Talk to Me.
I love that this premise is teen bullshit. It seems just so perfect. On some level, everybody in the room knows teasing the dead is either really stupid or really dangerous. But they’re kids. They have enough skill to do adult jobs while not quite having enough wisdom to avoid adult peril. The deal is this: there’s a magic ceramic hand. It’s the dead hand of a medium, we are told. If you shake hands and say, “Talk to Me,” then the movie has a title. Also, somebody dead and gross appears. The key step is the follow-up phrase, “I invite you in” which allows a dead dude to use your body as a playground until your friends wrench the hand away.
Wow. There’s a lot of faith going on there, huh? I mean, assuming you take the dare, you are trusting the people around you to excise you from the cold hand of death … and it doesn’t want to leave; being dead sucks. In the opening moments of the film, a partying teen -troubled by his channeling of the dead- stabs his brother and then kills himself. Serious party foul, dude.
Wait. Wait. Wait. This is an Australian movie. Serious party foul, Bruce.
Teenage Mia (Sophie Wilde) is motherless. With her dad often AWOL, Mia has adopted another family for comfort. Her best friend is Jade (Alexandra Jensen), a sadly uptight teen, flanked by Jade’s younger brother Riley (Joe Bird), and mom is Miranda Otto remember her? She was in Lord of the Rings! So one night there’s a stupid teen party where everybody gets a handjob – and by that I mean something much worse
than the standard accepted slang. Mia and Jade and Riley all go to a “meet the dead” party where everybody channels the dead except for Jade who is a dead prude. And when underage Riley insists upon showing the corporeal-challenged an inner-body experience, that’s when the horror really starts.
One of the reasons this film works is that it contains teens well-aware of the fact that they are making bad choices. This is like teens doing drugs, only their drug of choice has its own POV. In fact, the only time I truly disliked this film is when a desperate Mia started making choices that weren’t even wise from a teen POV.
While I fully expect Talk to Me to have a sequel or, worse yet, an American remake, I find either suggestion to yield a poor return. The horror worked on a reduced platform and an introductory level. Once you get into a film aware of its own popularity, the supernatural will have to be defined and combatted; Talk to Me isn’t really prepared to do either. This is a small-scale film with small-scale horror and it works on that level; I wouldn’t expect it to work on any other.
Participants are told not to linger
Cuz this artifact can summon a stinger
They all embrace the hand
And the response is unplanned
Turns out all it gave back was the finger
Rated R, 95 Minutes
Director: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Writer: Danny Philippou, Bill Hinzman, Daley Pearson
Genre: Monkey paw?
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Horror junkies
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Evil artifact collectors
