Talk to Me

• Directed by Danny and Michael Philippou (Feature Directorial Debuts)
• October 30, 2022 (Adelaide) / July 27, 2023 (Australia)
• Based on a concept by Daley Pearson

A group of teenagers discover that they are able to contact spirits using a mysterious embalmed hand.

How Talk to Me is Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes is beyond me. It takes forever for the film to get going. I would say 30 to 40 minutes give or take of characterization and setting up the lives of those in the story before we get to actual story. And it does nothing to make the characters likable in some form or interesting enough for the viewer to become invested in them. 

The excuse that makes the story happen is an embalmed hand covered in ceramic that either belonged to a saint or an individual that could communicate with a dead or even a Satanist. They drop that in as a half-hearted (and maybe unnecessary) explanation for its power. Why anyone thinks using this after the initial incident is a good idea is just left hanging. Of the assembled group nobody says “Nope! I’m out of here.” Eyes went all black and unfamiliar voices came out of their mouths for crying out loud!

As a horror film it doesn’t do too much scaring. The focus is on using a horror film to look at personal trauma. Mia (Sophie Wilde) is haunted by the death of her mother and thinks using a severed hand she finds in the possession of some douchebag associates that know nothing solid about it is a good idea. I am not sure if she is looking for closure or the truth about the death or whatever. Or maybe she is stupid to get the movie to happen.

An issue for me is that our central character of Mia has surrounded herself with a group of friends that do not appear to even SUPERFICIALLY like her. I am not expecting them to lay down their lives for her but what I saw made me question why they even associated. Mia’s “friend” Jade’s (Alexandra Jensen)-who feels Mia is needy-mother (Miranda Otto) is overtly hostile to Mia and her own children to the point most people would AT THE MINIMUM avoid the house.

This is supposed to be horror and not a movie about awful people. Try to scare me. But a film focused on dealing with trauma filled with unlikable characters? Why? Something like this you should care about the characters, and I just couldn’t become invested in any of them.

Visually it’s good. Danny and Michael Philippou in their feature directorial debuts do a great job of blending the real with the trickery of the evil hand. The transition between what was real and what was concocted by the hand was excellent but that deft bit of work does nothing to make this tolerable.

At 90 minutes Talk to Me is 45 minutes too long. You could’ve cut it in half and had a much tighter story. Then again, it wouldn’t have been a feature film, but rather an episode of an hour-long anthology series. Every time they start to get creepy or weird they pull away from that and give us a little more of the unlikable characters.

It’s been previously reported how Rotten Tomatoes has been manipulated. Heck, even Kirk Cameron managed to manipulate it for a little bit with one of his movies not that long ago. My point being is despite it being Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes it shouldn’t be. It’s not frightening. It is a long slog filled with two dimensional characters that do not like each other and you will not care about.

Talk to Me never got off the ground. I found it okay but if I had a choice between this and anything else, I’d probably watch anything else.