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Talk to Me ★★★½
(MA15+) 95 minutes
Even the biggest smash hits are easy to miss if you’re not looking in the right direction. Until the other day, I had never seen any of the work of the Australian twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, otherwise known as RackaRacka.
Sophie Wilde stars in Talk to Me, the debut movie from twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou.Credit: Maslow
Yet over the last decade, their high-energy videos have been watched over a billion times on YouTube, thanks to a surefire blend of gruesome black comedy, pop culture references, Jackass-style stunts and increasingly sophisticated special effects (their joint alias could refer to racking up the views, though it also derives from the Adelaide suburb of Pooraka where they started out).
Their biggest hits have titles such as Harry Potter VS Star Wars and Ronald McDonald Chicken Store Massacre; a few years ago Michael wound up in court for filling a Ford Laser with water during a heatwave and driving it to the bottle shop in scuba diving gear.
All this is to say that the Phillipous, now aged 30 and based in Los Angeles, have maintained a strong connection to the reckless spirit of adolescents desperate to escape boredom – a mindset portrayed with both fond intimacy and a certain distance in their shrewdly crafted, unexpectedly powerful feature debut Talk to Me, a teen horror movie with suburban Adelaide again as the setting.
The premise is yet another variant on that ancient horror stand-by The Monkey’s Paw, the paw equivalent in this case being a ceramic, embalmed hand inscribed with cryptic graffiti, its paranormal powers spoken of in quiet tones so as not to alarm adults.
Hold it and intone the correct words, and you’ll find yourself possessed by spirits from the beyond, whether ghosts or demons (or demonic ghosts). While this might be alarming to witness, the experience is apparently euphoric – and it’s possible to emerge outwardly unharmed, provided you don’t hang on for more than 90 seconds or so.
You can see why this could seem like fun at a house party. But for Mia (Sophie Wilde) it’s potentially something more – a chance to reconnect with her lost mother, who may or may not have taken her own life.
With her father Max (Marcus Johnson) keeping his distance, Mia has found a surrogate family through her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen), whose younger brother Riley (Joe Bird, especially impressive) she banters with in a manner that is by turns flirtatious and motherly.
While Wilde aces her possession scenes, in her mid-20s she may be slightly too poised to be a fully convincing teenager. Still, it’s not hard to suspend disbelief given the overall credibility and specificity of the film’s world, down to the exposed brown brick of the basement rumpus room where the seances are staged.
Miranda Otto, as Jade and Riley’s bluntly protective mother, gets her share of the cruder lines in a script where dry foul-mouthed Aussie humour is ever-present. However, it’s Zoe Terakes, as one of the self-appointed event facilitators Hayley, who most effectively hits the required note of jaded sarcasm.
Zoe Terakes easily hits notes of jaded sarcasm as Hayley in Talk to Me.Credit: Maslow
As all this indicates, Talk to Me is unapologetically character-driven, rather than relying on surface shocks in the manner some might have expected from the RackaRacka guys. Structurally, it’s closer to a young-adult novel than to a slasher movie that goes from one spectacular kill to the next.
All the same, the Philippous play fair by their audience. This is a real horror movie rather than an elevated one (or the tame kind geared to younger teens). The grim prologue leaves little doubt that horrible things are going to happen to people we’re asked to care about – and while the ending may not fully satisfy the emotional expectations that have been built up, better too few comforting explanations than too many.
It’s for the best, too, that all of this plays out with a minimum of moralism, and that we’re never forced to understand the occult merely as a metaphor, despite the obvious parallels with other kinds of experiments frequently pursued for kicks.
Literally speaking these kids aren’t doing drugs, although they’re chasing a comparable thrill for comparable reasons – half in love with death like the characters in a Gus Van Sant film while also hoping to break through to some unknown other side.
In cinemas Thursday.
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