Clever and nasty, Talk to Me marks the feature directing debut of brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, who rose to prominence with the horror-comedy YouTube channel RackaRacka. Here, along with cowriter Daley Pearson, they’ve concocted a story about a group of friends who use a cursed, embalmed hand to invite spirits to temporarily take over their bodies. They then record the ghastly results and post the videos online, where they’re mostly dismissed as a hoax. The possession scenes are the calling card for the Philippous as filmmakers, whose 360-degree camera captures both the unsettling otherworldliness of the ritual and the giddy naivete of the teens. Narratively, Talk to Me suffers from plot mechanics that are hard to follow and a bit of a “whose story is this?” problem, although eventually Sophie Wilde emerges as the lead. As Mia, a risk-taking teen whose mother recently died under mysterious circumstances, her huge eyes are widened even further, ghoulishly so, when she’s under the spirits’ control. Miranda Otto is also on hand as the mother of two other teens; she can usually sniff out what her kids are up to, but has no way of imagining what Talk to Me has in store for them.
(7/27/2023)
