Hand in Hand

There's a deep mythological undercurrent in Talk to Me (2022, directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou). When I described the film to my partner, she immediately suggested that the film's Maguffin is a hand of glory, a magical artifact made from the left hand of a hanged man which has powerful magic abilities. You may remember the hand of glory's appearance in The Wicker Man, among other places. The thought that it was a hand of glory occurred to me, too, while I was watching the movie. The severed hand in Talk to Me isn't exactly that, but bears a strong enough resemblance nonetheless, even down to the related use of a candle to invoke its power. It reminds me a little of the monkey's paw in the W. W. Jacob's story of the same name, as well, which itself seems descended from the hand of glory and its other mythological relatives. In Talk to Me, the severed hand of a medium is preserved inside a ceramic shell. It enables someone holding the hand, as if shaking it, to see and talk to the dead. If the holder invites the ghost, the ghost can possess them. Like the hand in "The Monkey's Paw," the hand in this film promises answers and wishes. Sort of. In the film, it's the center of teenage shenanigans so it all ends badly, as it must. These kids could have prevented a lot of heartache if they had all watched The Ring or Witchboard or some other tale of teens dabbling in the supernatural. But then you wouldn't have a movie.

The film opens with a young man, Cole, searching a party for his brother, Duckett. Duckett has locked himself in a room and Cole must break down the door to locate his brother. As Cole drags Duckett from the house, Duckett stabs Cole with a kitchen knife before plunging the knife into his own face, killing him. The story then centers itself on Mia, whose mother's death haunts her. She doesn't know if her mother died a suicide or by accident, and her father won't tell her which. She is distant from her father. She instead finds family with her best friend, Jade, and Jade's younger brother, Riley. Jade is currently dating Mia's ex, Daniel, with Mia's blessing. All four of them wind up at a party where the hosts, Joss and Haley, have a peculiar party game. They have a ceramic hand they claim encases the severed hand of a dead medium. When someone grasps the hand and asks the spirits to "Talk to me," a ghost will appear. The holder can then invite the ghost into themselves, but only for ninety seconds. Haley and Joss assert that if you go over ninety seconds, the ghosts become unwilling to leave. Mia volunteers to try it. Mia is a particularly open conduit, and sees multiple ghosts, one of which appears to have designs on Riley. It manifests physical influence on the real-world surroundings, much to the shock of everyone, including Joss and Haley who have never seen such a thing before. Mia goes over her ninety seconds. When she goes home with Jade and Riley, she's concerned at the attention Riley drew from the ghosts, but she's also thrilled at the experience. She wants to try it again. Mia and Jade arrange another session with the hand at Jade's house while her mother is away, and this time, Riley wants a go at it. Jade is adamantly opposed, but Mia gives him permission. Riley manifests a ghost who talks to Mia as if it is her mother before another ghost takes control and Riley suddenly becomes violent, bashing his own head into the table and mantlepiece before trying to pluck out his own eye. The assembled teens are shocked, and when Riley is inevitably hospitalized, it becomes apparent that no one disconnected him from the spirit in his body. Mia becomes more and more obsessed with communicating with her mother, who tells her that she must "help" Riley. But that spirit's story conflicts with the story Mia's dad tells her. She decides to trust the spirits and embarks to find Riley's spirit on the other side. Things don't go exactly to plan...

This is a glum film that goes to some pretty dark places. The filmmakers, making their first feature, haven't salted the film with anything like a sense of humor while piling up their horrors. Their opening sequence is a doozy, giving the audience a nasty shock at the outset. It's as if the filmmakers are priming the pump. They make good on the promise of this sequence with some pretty potent scenes of shock and violence, too, made all the nastier because they are generally inflicted by and upon people who are already hurting. This is obviously a film about grief, as many upscale horror movies these days are (this is very much of a piece with studio A24's horror preferences).  Riley is open to the manipulations of malevolent spirits because her grief has made her blind to the love of those around her and the film follows her down the rabbit hole to an ending that is both of a piece with her headspace and a kind of E.C. Comics twist of the tale. There is a tension between the film's artier pretensions and its essential pulp fiction infrastructure. The Philippous have taken a lot of notes from the broader genre, combining the melancholy ghosts of The Sixth Sense with the vengeful spirits of the J-horror boom, with a salting of George Romero and even John Wayne Gacy (the attention paid to Riley by his ghost strikes me as paedophillic). Sometimes this melange of art and pulp works. As a story structure, this is fundamentally sound. It feeds off its influences (like a hungry ghost?) and plays a bit like an urban legend. It's the sort of story that should be passed around a teen-age sleep-over party in late October.

As a matter of style, however...

Talk to Me is aggressively color-graded in monotone shades of steel gray and steel blue-gray most of the time, and it's under lit. I get that they're trying to impart a mood with these choices, but it looks like a thousand other films going for the same effect. The cinematography is functional, but it's also lazy, even accounting for the fact that this movie was made for a minuscule budget. It also has a kind of unintelligible sound mix that is the equivalent of its color palette, and I found myself wishing through most of its length that I had chosen to watch the film at home rather than at a theater because at home I would have the option of subtitles. The accents of the actors are inconsistent, inviting me to wonder why Mia and her dad, Max, have American accents while the rest of the cast have Australian accents. The accents don't help the sound mix. Indeed, they work in tandem to garble parts of the film, including the accents themselves. I'm told that Sophie Wilde is Australian so why she would sport an American accent is mystifying.

For the most part, the actors are good, though the film gives them limited emotional ranges to play. Sophie Wilde is the lead as Mia, and she spends most of the film playing depression, though she comes alive at the prospect of revisiting the dead. There's a metaphor there, maybe. Alexandra Jensen's Jade also gets two modes of expression, either as an infatuated teen girl obsessed with her boyfriend or as the sibling saddled with a tagalong little brother.  As a matter of representation, I appreciated the presence of Zoe Terakes as Haley, whose transness and queerness isn't even remarked upon. That they are a quasi villain is a nice touch, too. I like a film that walks the walk enough to get itself banned in someplace like Kuwait because of the mere presence of a trans and queer actor. The most nuanced performance comes from Miranda Otto, which is not a surprise given that she is a much bigger talent than this film requires. It's not surprising that she gets the widest range of performance as Jade and Riley's working mom. Her exchange with Mia late in the film outside Riley's hospital room requires an actor of her ability else it would feel inauthentic. Otto is more than up to it.

In spite of my reservations about the craft of the film, I like its dedication to its big idea. It has an ending in mind and damned if it doesn't pursue that end with a vengeance. I admire that. This is the kind of film that will linger because of that ending, long after all of my complaints are forgotten. Its life on streaming will surely smooth over all of those rough edges in the fullness of time should I ever choose to watch it again. And horror is still the only area of film that's holding off the onslaught of "IP-based cinema" because it's profitable without the stamp of corporate branding. Capitalism is ruining horror movies, too--don't even get me started on the most recent Scream sequel--but horror movies are uniquely able to resist the process of enshitification endemic to most corporate "content." An effective original horror movie in this economy? That's not only gold, it's a one way ticket to the cultural memory pool.

Still, I wish it were better. Its ideas deserve to be better-executed. I freely admit that it's probably good enough. It gets to where it means to go. Maybe if I let the film sit in my mind for a while, its ideas will age well. It happens sometimes, so who knows, eh?

---

This blog is supported on Patreon by wonderful subscribers. If you like what I do, please consider pledging your own support. It means the world to me.