The Philippou brothers, Michael and Danny, are young film-makers from Adelaide who started as production runners on Australian horror classic The Babadook and achieved a cult following for their film spoofs on YouTube under the handle RackaRacka; now with their debut feature they’ve let rip with a blast of wild punk energy and gleeful anarchy with this terrific scary movie. The opening party scene on its own has more voltage than a lot of horror movies, or any kind of movie. If the Sex Pistols ever directed a version of The Monkey’s Paw, it might look like this: a chilling adventure under which there is, however, an undertow of pathos, its title an ironic twist on the emotional pain involved in not talking about your feelings.
Sophie Wilde plays Mia, a young woman whose mum died after an overdose of pills which everyone has assured her was accidental, though her dad Max (Marcus Johnson) is unwilling to talk about it. Now lonely Mia likes hanging out at the house of her friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen), Jade’s kid brother Riley (Joe Bird) and her mum Sue (Miranda Otto), almost like a new member of the family.
But like all the rest of the young people in the ‘burbs, they are obsessed with rumours of an occult craze at parties thereabouts, with video evidence circulating on social media. A bunch of kids have got hold of a creepy china hand, understood to be an actual severed hand, ceramically encased. If you take hold of the hand and say “talk to me”, you see a dead person and if you invite that person in, he or she will invade your consciousness. But if you let it happen for more than 90 seconds, the dead person will invade your body for ever. Drunk, weed-smoking, giggling kids have been taking turns with the hand, solemnly timing each freaky 90-second trip with their iPhones.
Clearly, this is an example of ritualised group psychosis or mass hysteria, fuelled by drink and drugs and sexual dysfunction. Or is it? On one terrible night, Mia realises that one of the ghosts that has arrived inside someone is that of her late mother, who appears to have something to say about her death and about Mia’s dad. Desperate, Mia begs for more information, and the 90-second limit is catastrophically breached.
Talk to Me is freaky and confrontational and hilariously crass; it crashes through its plot progressions with tactless verve. Like the flatliners of Joel Schumacher’s famous 1990 film, these young people are dead set on pleasure and danger, but are unencumbered by any thoughtful qualms. Will the Philippou brothers discover the other hand for a creepy double-grip in the sequel?
• Talk to Me is released on 28 July in US, UK and Irish cinemas.
