Poster for Talk to Me (2023, A24)
Jesse Pasternack dives into the greatness of A24’s latest horror hit and why it reminds him of why he loves the movies.
Sometimes the simplest questions can provoke the most complex answers. For example, if you were to ask me, “Why do you love movies?” we might be here all day. I could talk about the feeling of calm I get from sitting in a dark room, focusing intently as I watch imaginary people live their lives, or about the excitement I feel when I talk to someone about something incredible that I just saw. I could talk about the intergenerational connection I have with my mom when we watch her favorite movie, All About Eve (1950), or the ones I want to forge with my own children when I show them something I loved when it first came out like Hugo (2011) or Paddington 2 (2017). I could talk about movies that made me feel wonder or sadness, movies that made me see the world as a big place or as a small one, movies that made me rethink what cinema could be or ones that thrilled me simply by telling a good story in an effective way. In short, I often have no single answer to the question “why do you love movies?” It’s hard to find one film that can sum up all the reasons why you love a medium that is over 100 years old and has produced tens of thousands of cultural works.
But today it’s not so hard. At this moment, after a thrilling second viewing, Talk to Me (2023) is why I love movies. It uses so many of the tools of cinema (great camera movements, impeccable blocking, brilliant sound design, and an effectively creepy score) to tell a story in a way that is more visceral and intimate than in other mediums. The writing also makes that story feel timeless and contemporary at the same time. In addition, Talk to Me announces the cinematic arrival of Danny and Michael Philippou, Australian brothers who got their start making YouTube videos for their channel RackaRacka. If this first film from them is any indication, they and their work are going to be in the lives of moviegoers for a long time.
Talk to Me is about Mia (Sophia Wilde), a teenager reeling from the untimely death of her mother. She tries to distract herself from her grief by going to a party thrown by Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio). The main purpose of the party is to show off a severed, embalmed hand that enables whoever grabs it to see and get briefly possessed by spirits held in limbo. Mia loves the experience, but things take a dark turn once she comes to believe that the spirit of her mother (Alexandria Steffensen) is trying to contact her.
Mia (Sophia Wilde) encountering the hand in Talk to Me (2023, A24)
Jonathan Demme once wrote that Roger Corman told him that directors should always “find legitimate, motivated excuses for moving the camera but always look for ways to move it” because “if you don’t keep the eyeball entertained, there’s no way you’ll get the brain involved.” From the first shot in Talk to Me, a two-minute stunner that follows a man named Cole (Ari McCarthy) as he looks for his brother at a party, it’s clear that the Philippou brothers and their director of photography, Aaron McLisky, know how to keep the eyeball entertained. They frequently use camera movements that lend a good sense of motion and energy to what is happening onscreen without being overly showy or ostentatious. In addition, their stationary shots have great mise-en-scène which frequently place you in Mia’s subjective headspace, my favorite of which is an early shot which keeps her father Max (Marcus Johnson) blurry in the background to demonstrate that she doesn’t care about what he is saying.
Talk to Me has great audio production value in addition to its visual style. Sound designer Emma Bortignon organizes a wonderful series of sounds to disorient the viewer, including but not limited to a faint scratching which becomes an effective motif and some dripping water to suggest the presence of a particular spirit. Composer Cornel Wilczek’s score is terrifying and the perfect accompaniment to the film’s scares. Wilczek’s music gets under your skin in a way that would be hard to replicate in a medium without music, and certainly not one which is so intimately tied to images as it is in cinema. The score is so unnerving that, while I normally listen to the music from films I write about for inspiration when creating pieces like this one, I had to turn off the soundtrack to Talk to Me after listening to just one track.
But great production values cannot hide a weak story, and thankfully there is no such weakness in this film’s narrative. The screenplay by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman (from a concept by Daley Pearson) is tight as a drum and makes great use of the central device of the embalmed hand. It’s often said that a horror movie should still work if you took all the scares out, and Talk to Me would be fascinating if it was just a tragedy about a young woman who can’t overcome the grief she feels at her mother’s death. That’s a universal dramatic situation which is also rendered contemporary by the directors’ up-to-the-minute portrait of how young people use the latest technology (most prominently cell phones and social media) to broadcast what they are experiencing and they make it feel specific by setting it in the Australian suburbs of Adelaide, which is hardly depicted in mainstream cinema.
A possessed Mia in Talk to Me (2023, A24)
Adelaide, more specifically its suburb of Pooraka, is also where Danny and Michael Philippou grew up. It’s where they started making shorts when they were children, and where they created many iconic videos for their YouTube channel RackaRacka. My favorite one is called “We Made a HORROR FILM (Talk to Me).” After a delightful montage of their early work, the video follows Danny and Michael as they go to the Sundance Film Festival, do press, and sell their film to A24. It’s funny, full of entertaining effects, and very moving as you watch Danny and Michael tell the people who’ve supported them for years about their film’s increasingly great success. If you want to make films, there are few videos that are more inspiring to watch than that one.
During the first scene where Mia gets possessed, Hayley yells, “That was the best one yet!” If you’re familiar with the earlier work of the Philippou brothers, then that is something that you could say about Talk to Me. But I think that it is also something that people will be saying about the movies they are going to make in the future as well. I’ve got a feeling that they will also give me many more answers to a certain question: “Why do you love movies?”
Talk to Me will be screened at IU Cinema on October 6 at 10pm as part of the Friday Night Frights series.