The Australian A24 film and 2023 Sundance hit Talk to Me peddles itself as a horror film. But it is more of a social commentary on the ills of the GenZ generation.
Directed by You-Tuber siblings Danny and Michael Philippou, in their feature film directorial debut, Talk to Me is a glossy supernatural horror that utilizes the social media age combined with the restless, thrill-seeking nature of teenagers, sprinkled with trauma and loss.
We have read disturbing news of life-threatening TikTok trends, challenges that went too far: from toilet-licking during the Covid-19 pandemic to the Benadryl Challenge to the Skull-breaking Challenge and Blackout Challenge, which literally caused multiple deaths, and other “dumb ways to die” gimmicks just for likes, comments and shares.
In Talk to Me, it’s demon-possession challenge. Reels showing teens getting themselved possessed by malevolent spirits for fun.
These kids are so desensitized by harmful activities filmed online that nothing appears extreme anymore. They scroll through social media, see a video of a kid being possessed, and they just wonder whether it’s fake or not.
To join the trend and get possessed for social media content, bored teens would gather around a severed and graffitied embalmed hand, which serves as a channel to communicate with equally bored spirits.
A volunteer would sit down in front of the hand, hold it as if shaking its hand in greeting and say “Talk to Me.” An ugly demon would appear instantly, only seen by the volunteer.
To level-up the experience, the volunteer can say “Let me in,” and the evil spirit will enter the volunteer’s body and that’s when the “real fun” begins for these content creators.
So concerned are the kids with filming and sharing content that they remain unfazed by the evil possession happening before them. They are more concerned about getting the best angle to film the moment. The scarier the possession, the more interesting.
Volunteers claim that the experience gives them a “high.” Teens in this movie have graduated from recreational drugs and alcohol, and now find addiction in demon-possession.
The central character is Mia (Sophie Wilde) who, on the second-year anniversary of her mother’s death, attends this demon-possession party and volunteers to try a “hit.”
Of course, as expected, one of these sessions soon goes wrong.
Nothing in the supernatural-horror aspect of the movie is scary, even the jumpscares or the neat prosthetics of the demons fail to stimulate the senses. The faces of the possessed, when distorted, simply remind you of “scary” TikTok filters. In fact, I suspect that the social-media raised Philippou brothers have been inspired by demonic TikTok filters for their first full-length.
Despite the sophisticated scoring and the cinematography, Talk to Me doesn’t provide thrill or tension. In place of exciting tension and the classic heebie-jeebies, it showcases instead extreme gore and disturbing self-harm violence, that watching it happen to mere teenagers feels rather tasteless.
I could not understand the intense hype for this film (it has a whopping 94 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes as of writing), especially with its glaring flaws and elements of the absurd, such as a character screaming inside an ICU room, but none of the medical staff hears it.
Horror can be thought-provoking and satirical, but it should not compromise the fundamentals of a true horror film — and that is simply to scare you.
Talk to Me is just a mildly imaginative commentary on the dark side of social media. Something that we are already well aware of and need not be reminded of in a frequently yawn-inducing and gruesome, R-rated manner.
0.5 out of 5 stars
Now showing in Philippine cinemas