Imagine spiritual possession as a party game and you’ve got “Talk to Me,” the debut horror film from Australian twin directors Danny and Michael Philippou that doesn’t cheat filmgoers with jump scares for jolts- they go right for the jugular.
Sophie Wilde stars as Mia, your normal teen who hangs out with her bestie Jade (Alexandra Jensen), Jade’s younger brother Riley (Joe Bird) and Jade’s boyfriend/Mia’s ex Daniel (Otis Dhanji). You’d expect sparks to fly in a torn teen love triangle, but it’s not until Jade convinces Mia to go to a party where Daniel will be that burnt relationship embers are replaced by bouts with ethereal entities.
As with any high school soiree you may have attended, you’ve witnessed either something dumb or dangerous- the party Mia attends has both. Joss (Chris Alosio), the kid who looks older than the other teen partygoers, produces a plastered embalmed left hand (graffitied more than Jim Morrison’s grave) with a forearm to hold it upright. As the kids gather round, a volunteer sits in a chair and is strapped in while the hand is placed on a table before them. As the volunteer holds the plastered hand in theirs, a candle is lit to ‘open the door’ to the sprits’ realm. The volunteer says “talk to me” and sees a corpse in front of them that the others cannot. When the volunteer says “I let you in,” the spirit obliges. As the irises in the volunteer’s eyes become the size and color of 8-balls, you know this is no joke- although the kids watching think otherwise as they film the volunteer’s possession with their iPhones.
Based on the convulsive shuttering and head slams into the table the possessed volunteer endures, you sense the spirits summoned are either having demented fun with their hosts or are unhappy to be there. While spirits can speak through their newly-acquired body, the possession spell isn’t broken until the volunteer releases the plaster hand and the candle’s extinguished to close the possession portal.
Mia volunteers and gets such a high off of her spiritual possession, she’s up for more. Maybe to escape the pain of seeing Jade and Daniel together or get over the accidental overdose death of her mother, the spirits provide some perverse release for Mia and she repeats the writhing ritual. It’s only when Jade’s brother Riley’s strapped into the chair where thinks go wrong- the head banging Riley experiences make everyone (including the audience) squirm in their seats.
Police are called, Riley’s taken to the ER, and Mia begins to get residual effects from her experiences with the other side- she sees her dead mother in the hospital. Since the possession ceremony wasn’t completed in Riley’s brutal brush with the beyond, Mia takes his hand while Riley sleeps and receives a vision of Riley being held by bloated rotting corpses denied their turn in the chair. Can Mia find a way to free Riley from eternal torment against spirits who know Mia can see them?
Though it seems absurd, I completely bought into kids playing a twisted occult game for kicks. As for the spirits, credit the script from Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman for making unreliable entities that, as we see with Mia and her mother, may be deceitful enough to want to devour souls. At the least, the entities want to give the living agita for not being left to rest in peace.
Add Sophie Wilde as “Talk to Me’s” other impressive element. Wilde commands the demand of her role as Mia, an emotional rollercoaster that runs the gambit from calm likability to crying-on-cue chaos. Whether possessed or being a manipulated pawn in a ghost’s game, Wilde’s the best horror female lead I’ve seen since “The Babadook’s” Essie Davis (they’re both Aussies, so there must be something in the water ‘down under’).
With “Talk to Me,” it’s obvious the Philippous were smart and serious students of “The Exorcist” and “The Evil Dead.” When it comes to plausible possession, they don’t pull any punches.