The Best Movies Of The Year: Talk To Me Builds A HorrorUniverse Microcosm
I've been thinking about Talk to Me for five months . Overall, I walked away from the film's premiere impressed with Danny and Michael Filippo's feature debut, a teenage horror filled with visceral terror and dark humor. The density of the film is incredible. I was so impressed when I saw the movie that when it came time to write a review a few days later, I was a little lost and it was hard to express how well the movie worked.
Overall, those who click on Talk to Me will find a lot to love: great performances, great humor, great scare sequences, practical effects, and a sense of youthful energy that's both funny and challenging. But after watching the film again, I think I finally understand what fascinated and mesmerized me all those months ago. These are not fast-paced stories or scary scenes. In doing so, the film manages to create an entire universe of horror in microcosm without giving up on presenting a set of conventions and ground rules to its audience.
It all starts in the first shot, when we see a chaotic party where a young man is looking for his brother, another young man named Duckett. We know nothing about Duckett and will never get to know him as a character because in moments he dies for reasons we still don't understand. From a mainstream horror story point of view, we know this scene is meant to throw us off balance, give us a jolt of violence and unpredictability that has us on the edge of our seats for the first few minutes, but talk to me, do n't stop there . . Duckett is not just a dead man. Like the ghost at the center of the film, it lingers and plays a central role in how it builds the film's mythology.
The narrative then focuses on Mia (Sophie Wilde) and her friends, and for a moment the agenda seems to be gone forever. We learn that Mia recently lost her mother, is struggling and is very interested in a series of videos where her friends offer to communicate with ghosts. Yet the film does not tell us everything. It just shows Mia, an ordinary disenfranchised teenager, watching the video and saying, "I want to see if this is real."
Indeed, within minutes we see the brilliance of Talk to Me's pacing and how it inserts (literally) small moments of knowledge into the story of teenagers looking for a ride that can lead to conversation. After them, we get precious little concrete information about Mia when she meets MacGuffin, a ceramic-encased disembodied hand that serves as a conduit for the dead in the film. Mia's friends Hayley (Joe Terrax) and Gus (Chris Alucio) know enough about the artifact to make it seem safe to handle, but they also admit to doing as they've been told before. This tenuous understanding of the 'rules' of fear and the transmission of information through the air through relevant bits of dialogue, video clips and shared texts speaks to the film's originality in its attempt to depict the adolescent experience. You'll never know everything about the party you're going to, either before or after the night. You only know what you hear, see and feel, and that's all you can keep.
As the film progresses, what Mia sees and hears changes dramatically and terrifyingly: an encounter with Bede that brings out her mother's nightmare goes horribly awry, putting one of her friends in grave danger, and Mia herself is killed by the man ghost. the ghosts that haunt him. Nothing and his hands are tied with rituals, but he moves freely in his daily life. Desperate to find the key to this disturbing mystery, Mia turns to Duckett's surviving brother for answers, but even here we only get possible facts that may or may not help. Someone Won Through these conversations, Duckett himself goes from a more mysterious and shadowy figure as a sort of Patient Zero in the movie, to an elusive ghost from the past, a guy you hear about at parties but never hear from not. to meet
When it first aired, Talk to Me drew criticism for its awkward segments, with some accusing it of shaky logic and completely inconsistent storytelling. But as Mia descends into an abyss of death, manipulation and chaos throughout the film, Talk to Me reveals that her logic is not quite right. Where does the hand come from? Nobody knows for sure. Why was Duckett's reaction so bad? I have no idea. Why is this evil spirit bent on destroying the lives of Mia and her friends? We just don't know, just like we don't know who discovered that the hand is covered in ceramic, why it has so much writing on it, or that 90 seconds is the perfect window to communicate with the dead. Beat the world.
But here's the thing: None of this missing knowledge makes the movie feel incomplete. As before , the film builds a whole, impressive and frightening world based on pieces of lore, never giving us the full picture, but rather making us feel that we get more than the film gives us . This is partly due to the technical aspects of filmmaking, but the film's greatest success was emotional rather than practical. Being a teenager means catapulting yourself from one stage to the next and back again to the highest highs and then the lowest lows, with no real road map to take you back. The whole thing feels very tense, and to be honest, it can feel like you're trying to take down a huge supernatural monster, and no matter how hard you fight, you lose. If you know a little about the rules and have some keys to unlock the master plan, you can win the battle, but the universe doesn't give you a master plan. Instead, you get snippets and glimpses of what might work in your chaotic little world , where your friends can betray you and leave you to the monsters. It's a time of excitement, yes, but it can also be a time of clinging to the mirror, desperately searching for meaning in a world that seems too shallow for all the heavy emotions.
By rooting its story in a world of evil spirits and strange nightmares that we can't quite understand, Talk to Me literally transforms the experience into a powerful horror story, capturing something important about the process of growing up and a create world of perspective. The horror is now ripe for future sequels. Mia's story is intimate, but her world is really big and full of dark corners that she can never fully illuminate. This makes Talk to Me one of the best movies of the year
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture and entertainment writer who has been writing about entertainment for over a decade . His writing on film, television, comics and more appears regularly in SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and more. She lives in Austin, Texas, and when she's not writing, she's usually counting down the days until Christmas.
