Talk to Me (2023)

 

Aussie twins Michael and Danny Philippou have written and directed a bitchin' adolescent horror flick that scares circles around the latest Insidious installment and doubles as a slam dunk of an anti-drug movie that is blessedly free of controlled substances.

Moody teens Mia (Sophie Wilde) and BFF Jade (Alexandra Jensen) don't need the hard stuff when their friends Hayley and Joss (Zoe Terakes and Chris Alosio, respectively) hold parties whose main feature is the preserved hand of a dead medium.

If touched and the title of the film is spoken, visions of the ghostly dead appear. That's the gateway. The hardcore stuff is inviting the spirit in for a ride.

When Mia spends a little too much time talking to the hand, perhaps while trying to impress her ex-squeeze, the chaste Daniel (Otis Dhanji), things start getting out of, er, hand. And when Jade's tween-sib Riley (Joe Bird) asks for a little taste of what the cool kids are doing, the whole trippy affair rises to new levels of grim gruesomeness. ("I turned my pesky little brother on and now look at him!")

With Talk to Me, the Philippou brothers, of the 2014 horror winner The Babadook, offer a fairly fresh take on the spirit possession flick, save for a few narrative misfires and peculiarities. The holes won't keep the picture from scoring big points with young fans of the genre and their parents who are more concerned about the evil effects of crank than the undead.