Talking to the Hand: Talk to Me (2022)

At a majorly down and isolated time in her life, Mia (Sophia Wilde) drags bestie Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and her little brother Riley (Joe Bird) to a party. This is not the typical soiree interested in drinking and hooking up. Well, there’s that too, but when bad boys and party leaders Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alonsio) take over? Everyone gets out their phones to record for posterity because things are about to get freaky.

The game is your typical party trick with a dose of twenty-first century immediacy. A plaster arm (which might hold a dead medium’s hand) is the focus. The participant is tied to a chair, grasps the hand, recites two sentences, and then has a paranormal experience. We know its working because the participant’s pupils get insanely wide as though gazing into the darkest room imaginable. Scleral lenses wide. They froth and spit and sometimes jabber, as the ghost rides around in their bodies. When Hayley’s timer goes off, it’s time to disconnect them from the death grip they have on the hand. Let them run past ninety seconds, and the ghosts might decide to stay forever.

Tonight’s first participant is Mia. It’s the second anniversary of her mother Rhea’s (Alexandria Steffensen) suicide, and she needs an emotional bump. She tried smoking a joint once, but it didn’t work. So, this time she’s going for the uncanny.

“Talk to me,” she recites and then sees two ghosts seated nearby—the Eerie Man (Robin Northover) and a soggy, possibly drowned corpse Olmen (Frances Cassar). Contact with the other side has begun, but she breaks contact with the hand. The crowd goads her on. Not her bestie or her bestie’s little brother, however. Just everyone else in the room.

“I invite you into me,” she says, after restoring contact. The ghost invades, the camera tilts, her eyes go buggy wide, she begins to smile like one of The Evil Dead, and then she tells young Riley how much the other spirits in the room like him. They want to split him, she recites until the ghost party game hosts manage to pry the occult object from her grasp. It’s been ninety-three seconds, however. Does she feel changed? Well, no.

However, changed she is. Now she can see dead people from time to time, without the hand. Also, she’s pretty well jonesing for another chance at the thing. This will come in a more intimate setting, when Jade hosts a gathering with her bestie Mia, her boyo Daniel (Otis Dhanji), Hayley and Joss, Riley and his best mate Alex (Jett Gazley). All the older teens but Jade (who is surprisingly sensible for this sort of horror film) take a turn … well, several turns, actually. All great fun, if your definition of fun is a supernatural spin on Truth, Dare, Double-Dare, Promise to Repeat.

When Alex wants a turn, he’s shot down immediately. When Riley begs for sixty seconds, Mia is all for it, but Jade is not. When the older sister storms out of the room, Mia gives her blessing for fifty seconds, and the game gets a fourteen-year-old player. And everything goes wrong. Personal connection with the spirit that inhabits him, and then a string of self-inflicted violent deeds and psychokinetic actions result in Riley staying under for almost two minutes and in need of a hospital.

After that, friendships are called into question, Riley and Jade’s mum Sue (Miranda Otto) is quick to assess blame, and personal misery and mounting addiction to the dead sends Mia on a downward spiral. However, she may be the only one who can save Riley from the fiendish spirits still possessing him and intending him harm. Or is Mia being played by those spirits? Or is Mia really having a psychological breakdown and finding answers where none exist? Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou helm a fright flick that fuses ghost stories, occult artifacts with shady histories, psychological horrors, and teen angst in Talk to Me (2022).

When Trista and I first saw the trailer for this one, it looked like a fun fright ride but nothing we wanted to spend a full price, evening ticket for. After its release, I caught some good word of mouth about it and was hopeful for a solid watch. I eventually caught the film in a matinee on my daughter’s first day of school, and that’s a good thing. Whatever audience this film is targeting, well it does not include me.

This doesn’t mean I hated every minute of the thing. It’s not quite in the same league of irritation that I got while sitting through that pretty annoyance Midsommar (2019). There are some interesting elements at play here.

The plaster hand, serving as the gateway to the otherworldly is pretty freaking cool. Both as a physical design as well as an object with a past shrouded in mystery. Is there really a hand inside? How old it is? All those arcane markings just look neat, forbidding. It always looks ready to grasp the seeker’s hand and not let go.

The first possession party is shot exquisitely, and it builds to a pleasantly creepy series of moments when Mia is targeting that young teen with jeers and jibes. The music, the images, the acting, it all builds to a singularly disturbing moment that’s perfectly executed. Likewise, the eruption of strangeness around Riley’s turn talking with the hand is interesting. It’s not high on the creative mayhem meter, perhaps, but it’s effectively done and unsettling. The sound work of his head slamming into hard objects, or his sister’s hand getting in between an unstoppable object and an unmoving one can make the sternest viewer tense up in sympathy.

The makeup for Riley in the hospital as well as the spooks that Mia sees is all terrific, too. These are not goopy special effects. The wounds look painful as hell, the use of prosthetics and makeup to evoke the long time dead are evocative and eerie. Love it.

There’s a running commentary on the sociopathic tendencies some people (particularly the young) have, recording people at their most vulnerable and then laughing at them. No one is kind to anyone else, everyone in the film is centered on themselves and extending helping hands only because of the promise of getting something in return, and everyone is particularly interested in preserving their secrets from others. The dead exemplify these sorts of attributes taken to eleven. One of the most twisted offerings of the film is how death basically frees the spirit and allows it to become the ultimate asshole.

The plot itself? Well, it’s a bit too packed with things for my taste. Cluttered, unsure if it wants to be a cool cautionary tale, a Hellraiser-style mythic dark fantasy experience, or a psychological character study. So, it tries to do all of those, and it doesn’t quite succeed.

The acting is good, but the characters themselves are not ones I can either connect with and want to see succeed or care to follow around for long. This film features a cast of characters I don’t feel any investment in doing things and reacting to scary presences and scarier choices that I couldn’t care less about.

Bounced out of the world of the story allows a viewer the chance to see how scrupulously and shamelessly the film follows a checkbox approach to raising stakes and invoking the sorts of elements that made other A24 offerings into box office successes. So, we have a protagonist grappling with mourning for a lost mother, who is learning secrets about her family. We have a child that is battered almost beyond recognition—maybe the head isn’t lopped off and left in a nest of ants on the side of the road, but that child is about as responsive as a corpse. We have a supernatural threat that’s intent on long term bodily possession. We have a father character who ends up dead before the third act really gets underway. We have a cult of sorts who gather to witness the occult rituals, all smiling like crazy (these ones wear more clothes). It’s Hereditary (2018) redux. Even the commentary on sociopathic tendencies among the young set was done better in Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) Though it tries to add some personality and individuality to the proceedings but falls short for me.

So, I went and I watched, I saw a few neat details that made me sit up and immerse, mostly I was restless, and then I went home and had to look up all the character names on IMDB while writing this because they’d faded on the fifteen minute drive between theater and house. That’s my summation of the film experience. How disappointing.

#

Talk to Me  is currently playing in theaters. However, it is also available for pre-order in 4K UHD, DVD/Blu-ray, and VOD editions.

Next, we will take a look at God is a Bullet. It is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD. The novel it is based on is available in eBook and paperback.

Writing for “Talking to the Hand: Talk to Me (2022)” is copyright © 2023 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

Disclosure: Considering Stories is a member of the Amazon Associates. Under that program, purchases made using the product links in any of our articles can qualify the Considering Stories site for a payment. This takes the form of a percentage of the purchase price, and it is made at no additional cost to the customer.