8/10 As I grow to hate brands as a concept more and more, it’s hard not to still love A24. For as uniform as some of their films can feel, the indie studio’s brand is talent-seeking and celebrating the talents they find, and after years of slow, low-budget, character-driven horror films, their selections still feel fresh. 

Well, it’s a cute trick – low-budget, character-driven films will always feel fresh. 

Adelaide, South Australia- two years after the death of her mother, 17-year-old Mia (Sophie Wilde) finds a new distraction in the high school party scene – a statue of a hand, reputed to be the severed hand of a medium encased in stone, that allows anyone who grips it to be possessed by a dead spirit, though the connection must be severed after 90 seconds or part of the spirit will remain. The possessing spirit appears to be random, and they all frantically act out to enjoy having a body as much as they can for the limited time, so it’s mostly useful for funny home videos and a quick high. Predictably, things go south very quickly. 

It’s indie icon A24’s major July release in the U.S., though they only got the domestic rights, and Talk to Me is in line with A24’s established horror work and razor-sharp eyes for talent. It comes from directing duo Danny and Michael Philippou, twins known on Youtube as RackaRacka. They say they’re dedicated to creating horror through plot and camerawork, and Talk to Me reflects that completely. With a $4.5 million production budget, it’s a tour of everything you can do for cheap. 

The film makes the most of its young actors playing out their black-eyed possession scenes, and for all the blood effects and makeup and jumps you can get from editing, human beings behaving erratically is one of the most terrifying things a lot of people ever experience. 

They also get a lot of mileage out of the hand itself, with close-ups from every odd angle to unnerve and sudden gripping to create understated jumps. Using the hand is a two-step process, first inviting a spirit to the table and then inviting them into your body. In most cases between those steps, we get to see the ghost who’s joined the table, and that’s the makeup department’s time to shine. They’re also not shy with the blood effects.

Setting is another brilliant, cheap and devastating way to bring the horror home, one that horror lends itself to as a genre. Talk to Me takes place in single-family houses and hospitals, with the climax set on the side of a highway interchange. It’s that classic Halloween effect – the monster was born, raised and still lives in the suburbs, and it’s doing its work on teenagers right under their parents’ noses. 

We’ve been in an extended moment after The Babadook – so, for 10 years now – where just about every horror movie is “secretly about trauma” as a way of elevating the usual trash, making horror even more bland and trashy than it traditionally has been by making even the subtext uniform. 

Talk to Me is a breath of fresh air because it puts the grief in motion. The backward coming-of-age story carries us all the way through grief and trauma to a holistic look at teenage life. Mia still grieves her mother, but that grief interacts with every aspect of high school party culture – peer pressure, unclear risk and a generally unsafe environment. In an early scene, a character sexually humiliates himself on video while possessed, and he has no recourse. The possessed hand-purveyors, who are also the cameramen, have no sympathy. When things escalate into actual emergencies, of course these teenagers have no idea what to do. 

Age of consent also becomes a problem when Mia and her best friend, Jade (Alexandria Jensen), also 17, find themselves telling Jade’s 15-year-old brother Riley (Joe Bird) that he’s too young to play with the hand – at an underage party, who are they to say? 

A nervousness about drugs pervades the film for obvious reasons. Parents, when they can be involved, are worried about drugs and alcohol, not a magic hand that can summon the dead, and Mia questions a peer’s cigarette use in an early scene. The hand exists at the intersections of life and death and of the real and the fantastic, but for this film, it’s the intersection between grief and coping mechanisms, winding these aspects of human behavior into a single danger. 

These are the kinds of nuanced looks at humanity you can expect from small, character-driven productions, and it’s what we can expect from the Philippou twins going forward. They say they’re committed to shooting and setting their films in Adelaide, their hometown, which will likely limit them to smaller budgets anyway, and it looks like they’ll be staying in the world of Talk to Me specifically for some time – a prequel is already shot, and a sequel is already greenlit. 

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.