Film / Talk to Me

Let the other side take hold.

Hayley: Alright, somebody time it. As soon as she lets it in, it cannot go for more than 90 seconds. Am I clear?
Mia: What happens after 90 seconds?
Hayley: They'll want to stay.
Joss: And if you die while they're in you...they'll have you forever.

Talk to Me is an Australian supernatural horror film directed by Danny and Michael Philippou in their feature debut. Danny additionally co-wrote the film alongside Bill Hinzman, basing it on a concept by Daley Pearson.

Mia (Sophie Wilde) is a 17-year-old girl coping with the second anniversary of her mother Rhea's death by suicide and a distant relationship with her father. She finds refuge in her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and her family, mother Sue (Miranda Otto) and little brother Riley. One day, Mia, Jade and Riley sneak off to a party with their friends. For fun, the group plays a game involving an embalmed hand that is said to belong to a medium. A ritual allows the participant to conjure a spirit by grasping the hand and saying "Talk to me", after which the spirit proceeds to possess the participant. They must be careful not to let the possession exceed 90 seconds.

What could possibly go wrong?

The film had a preview screening at the 2022 Adelaide Film Festival followed by a premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival on January 22 of that year. It was theatrically released in Australia on July 27, and internationally the following day, being distributed in the United States by A24.

A sequel, Talk 2 Me, entered development shortly after the film's release, while a prequel featuring the character Duckett has also reportedly been filmed.

Not to be confused with the 2007 biographical film starring Don Cheadle as Ralph Greene.

---

Talk to Me contains examples of:

• Accidental Suicide: Rhea's spirit tells her daughter Mia that her death was an accident and that she did not intend to kill herself. However, Mia's father shows her Rhea's suicide note towards the end of the film.
• Accomplice by Inaction: Riley becomes possessed by a spirit masquerading as Rhea. Eager to talk to her mother, Mia stops the others from blowing out the candle, despite clear warnings of the approaching 90-second mark. Riley pays immediate, horrific consequences.
• Affectionate Nickname: Mia's close friends and family call her "Mi". The spirit that possesses Riley does the same, which reveals that it's Mia's mother (or at least presenting itself as her), and the fact that it knows about the nickname convinces Mia that it really is her mother.
• Aloof Big Sister: Jade has this additude towards Riley, dismissing any of his attempts to be closer with her, which clearly has an effect on him. After being shaken by Mia's possession, she refuses to let him sleep in her room, and then later makes fun of him for it in front of everyone.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Apart from being hit by a car, the exact circumstances of Mia's death are unclear. Was she pushed by Jade, or did she throw herself in front of the car to avoid being manipulated by the ghosts? When the scene is slowed down, the viewer can see Jade reach Riley and Mia before Mia is flung in front of the car, and Mia's confusion over her sudden death suggests that her death was not intentional on her part, implying that she was pushed rather than jumping. Having said that, Jade does not appear to be punished in any way for killing Mia, which further muddles things.
  • The state of Max, Mia's dad, at the end of the film. After Mia comes back as a spirit, she sees Max walking away from her, with him not responding to her cries. Either he managed to survive being stabbed in the neck (he was still conscious by the time Jade found him), or his wounds were fatal and the ending is representative of him going to heaven (notably, he's shown heading towards an exit door that has bright white light pouring out of it).
• And I Must Scream:
  • The spirits want to kill Riley so his soul will be stuck with them forever. One way they attempt this is to show Mia a vision of Riley in limbo being subjected to unending torture by the spirits there, and convincing her she must kill his body to free him. However, the latter may have been a façade to push Mia into thinking she needed to take action.
  • Mia, after realizing she died trying to save Riley, is now trapped on the other side of the hand while others play the game, likely forever.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Mia spends the film fighting to figure out the rules of the hand and the spirits it connects to in order to prevent the spirits from claiming Riley's soul into their ranks. At the end of the film, Mia herself is killed and becomes a spirit bound to the hand.
• Artifact of Doom: The embalmed hand allows the ritual participant to be possessed, but the ritual must end within 90 seconds. When the rule is broken, there are dire consequences for whoever was using the hand (see Horror Hates A Rule Breaker below for a more in-depth explanation).
• Beauty Equals Goodness: All of the spirits we see are heavily disfigured and actively malevolent. The only one we see that is helpful is a little girl who looks almost perfectly normal.
• Bittersweet Ending: Leaning heavily on the bitter side. Riley is able to make a full recovery, and it's implied the same goes for Mia's father Max, but Mia's entire journey to save Riley was pointless as his possession was going to wear off over time. She manages to stop herself before accidentally playing into the spirits' scheme to claim Riley's soul forever, but does so at the cost of her own life and permanently being bound to the spirits instead, meaning that her father has now lost both a wife and a daughter. At the very end, Mia is summoned as the spirit to a new group that has the hand, with the hint that the cycle of what happened with her and Duckett will begin again.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Full possession of a ritual participant is visually signified by their eyes turning completely black. We see this happen in real time when Mia first tries it, with her pupils slowly dilating until the darkness in her irises completely fills her eyes.
• Body Horror: The spirits conjured by the hand take the form of people with their bodies disfigured in grotesque ways that allude to how they died, such as emaciation, rot, bloating and waterlogging.
• Body Motifs: Hands, both as a symbol of reaching out and of something taking hold of you.
  • The hand used for the spirit ritual is something the player grasps onto before spirits take hold of them.
  • Throughout the story, we see hands as a symbol of human connection, as people use their hands to bond with others (such as when Mia and Daniel playfully compare hand sizes) or distance themselves (such as when Jade tries holding her mother's hand after Riley is hospitalized, and she pulls her hand away).
  • Hands are also portrayed as a symbol of the trauma manipulating Mia. She has a nightmare where she envisions her hands bruised and bloodied after trying to scratch at a door like she imagines her mother did, and a big sign that she's dead at the end is the fingers of her hands being broken.
• Deliberately Cute Child: A potential interpretation of the ghost of the little girl — she's just a plant to gain Mia's trust. It is never confirmed, but the lie is far more likely than the situation being honest.
• Demonic Possession: The whole point of the ritual is to conjure a spirit and consent to be possessed. When the "do not exceed 90 seconds" rule is broken, an evil entity is unleashed in the participant's body, and grievous bodily harm (if not death) becomes a very real possibility. Later in the film, the reverse is shown to be possible with Mia being pulled into the spirit's realm, a particularly hellish place.
• Did Not Die That Way: Mia's mother killed herself, rather than accidentally overdosing. Mia's father kept the suicide note hidden from her, to prevent her from blaming herself. The ghosts use both of those informations against Mia, making her even more paranoid than she already is.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: It's not difficult to interpret the hand as a metaphor for a drug.
  • Mia and her friends get freaked out when trying the hand for the first time, but then get really into it. Things also go south fast when the youngest member of the group tries to get involved. The allusions to a bad drug trip are not exactly subtle, with Sue and Max outright asking after Riley's disastrous turn with the hand if he was given something.
  • Mia's continuous use of the hand is portrayed pretty much exactly like a drug addict who keeps using to dull the pain of their traumas and to escape reality. The possession is also stated to end if the person lives long enough after a failed ritual, paralleling the breaking of an addiction being a process over time to get you clean.
• Drugs Are Bad: The hand ritual is essentially framed as a dangerous drug. It gives visions, highs and unsettling euphoria, dilates users' pupils, and requires other people present to be more safely partaken, akin to trip sitters. Prolonged exposure to the hand and spirits can also lead to residual effects that cause emotional instability and dangerous actions. The hand is also presented as an inappropriately-accepted social experience that everybody ought to recognize as the danger it is, and goes especially poorly with a younger participant.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: The ritual used to conjure spirits is treated as another party game, with videos of demonic possessions being uploaded onto social media. The teens in the group end up allowing the conjured spirit to stay too long and suffer the consequences.
• Eye Scream:
  • In the opening, Duckett stabs himself in the eye after being possessed.
  • Riley tries to pluck out his own eye while possessed.
• Facial Horror: As a result of him exceeding the time limit while possessed, Riley's body is overtaken by spirits that brutally smash his face on several tables, not to mention having him try to gouge out his own eye. As we see in several excruciating close-ups afterwards, Riley's face is horribly disfigured as a result.
• Family of Choice: Jade and her family (mother Sue and brother Riley) are this for Mia, who is distant with her father Max. When both Jade and Sue tell Mia they don't want to see her after a possessed Riley nearly kills himself, this devastates Mia and sets in motion the rest of the film.
• Fatal Flaw: Mia's crushing loneliness after her mother's death drives her to make decisions out of denial, desperation, and an avoidance of facing reality.
  • This is hinted at when she sees a dying kangaroo on the road and she tries to run it over, but instead elects to drive around it in hopes that another car will do it, letting the kangaroo suffer to avoid the guilt of taking its life.
  • This is taken to the extreme when Riley's possession is approaching the limit and she keeps the hand on him out of her need to talk to her mother, who is the spirit that has possessed Riley. When her actions send Riley to the hospital, she is seen literally and figuratively washing the blood from her hands, unable to cope with what she just did. She is informed that letting Riley's possession wear off on its own is the only cure, but feels the need to take more action to atone for her mistakes, which makes the situation spiral.
  • And the one plot point permeating the whole film: Mia cannot accept that her mother's death was a suicide and not an accident. When the spirits masquerade as her mom and tell her this lie, she is so alone and in pain that she becomes much more willing to believe it, to the point that she ignores the suicide note from her mom that her father unveils to her, choosing to believe the spirits instead. This choice is what leads to the events that befall her leading up to the ending, including her death.
• Fate Worse than Death: It's not enough that Mia is dead — now she's another spirit the hand can channel with.
• Fingore:
  • Jade tries to block Riley's head from smashing against a table with her hand, which breaks her fingers.
  • In a nightmare, Mia's fingernails inexplicably turn bloodied and broken with some of them pulled back, mirroring how her mother had been clawing at the door by the time her dad found her body.
  • Part of Mia's fatal injuries at the end is her fingers being broken.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Duckett's behavior in the opening scene mirrors much of what befalls Mia later: becoming unstable and seeing spirits at will, attempting to kill someone at the behest of a dead family member, all culminating in his own violent death.
  • While driving Riley home, Mia comes across a severely injured kangaroo, and despite Riley's encouragement, she is unable to put it out of its misery. Later on, she is told that she needs to kill Riley in order to rescue him from limbo, but cannot bring herself to do it. When she is killed by oncoming traffic shortly after, the overhead shot of her body on the road mirrors a similar shot of the kangaroo.
  • Earlier in the same scene, Mia and Riley sing along to Sia's "Chandelier", a song widely perceived as being about suicide, which is something the spirits will attempt to their hosts if they stay in possession for too long.
• Glamour Failure: Rhea — or at least the spirit that looks like Rhea — slowly suffers this between each appearance. At first, she just looks distant and blurry. Up close, her lips and eyes are heavily discolored. By the end, her skin is decaying and her face is covered in vomit. It's implied with water sounds that the spirit's identity may actually be the waterlogged woman who first possessed Mia, and that the illusion is failing and uncovering the real form, and that the spirit is weakening its hold the longer Mia lives after that possession because the spirits can lose power if the victim survives long enough.
• Head Desk: Played for Horror. While under the influence of the conjured spirit, Riley smashes his face to a pulp on several tables, putting himself into a coma.
• Hereditary Suicide: Alluded to as a concern. Mia's mother died from what was ostensibly a suicide, and when Mia starts to become paranoid and isolated by the spirits and shuts herself away, her father breaks down the door to reach her, certainly remembering having to do so before when his wife was already dead on the other side of the door, and thus certainly worrying that Mia is trying to kill herself.
• Here We Go Again!: The film ends with Mia's spirit being summoned by another group who has come into possession of the hand.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: The spirits develop an immediate, inexplicable obsession with Riley and claiming his soul to join their ranks, but it's not explained why. A possessed Mia simply turns to Riley unprompted and says "They like you...", and that's all the info we are given.
• Horror Hates A Rule Breaker: Instructions for the ritual clearly specify that the candle that "opens the door" must be blown out within 90 seconds. Going over creates a lasting bond with the spirits that is stronger the longer the "door" was open. A strong bond will allow the spirits to seize control of your body and make you kill yourself. If you die while the bond is still active, your soul is forever trapped with the spirits.
• Jacob Marley Apparel: The ghosts appear to have the same appearance they had when they died.
• Jerkass: Hayley is a crass and inconsiderate party animal who gets annoyed when anyone or anything is disrupting them from having a good time, but this is portrayed more as the immaturity that comes with teenage years than anything. They are also concerned if Mia is OK when the time limit goes over, and are hesitant to disrupt when Mia is talking to her "mom" again through Riley.
• Karma Houdini: Downplayed. The two teens who possess the hand suffer no true consequences for parading it around, but they are as horrified as the rest of the group when things go wrong, and they do try to prevent Riley from going over 90 seconds. Ultimately, they were just being reckless teenagers, but neither of them thought someone would get hurt, and they are left shaken by the experience, especially Joss, who gets called out by Cole for bringing the hand into people's lives despite knowing what happened to Cole's brother.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Shortly after the main group has passed the hand around, laughed at a possessed Daniel humiliating himself, and excitedly agreed to let Riley try the hand, their moods slowly dim when they realize that Mia's mother is the spirit possessing Riley, and they immediately react with shock and horror when Riley begins smashing his face into the table.
• Mercy Kill:
  • Discussed and subverted. Mia and Riley come across a dying kangaroo on the road. Riley tells Mia to kill it to end its suffering, but she can't do it.
  • Subverted again, in a different way. The ghost imitating Rhea convinces Mia that killing Riley would release his soul from Limbo, but this is a trick and it would instead keep him there forever. It's implied at the end when "Rhea" attempts to assure Mia that Riley would be "theirs forever" (in her care) that Mia remembers those words and realizes killing him would be playing right into the evil spirits' hands.
• Mirror Monster: Some ghosts only appear as reflections.
• Missing Reflection: At one point, Mia states that she has a recurring nightmare where she's unable to see her reflection. When she is transported to the hospital at the end shortly after being hit by a car, we briefly see that she has no reflection when she looks into a mirror, implying that this is a surreal post-death vision.
• Motif: Doors appear prominently as a symbol throughout the film, with many shots focusing on doors, the ritual referring to the metaphysical "door" opened to the spirits, and the door reflecting emotional separation and danger. Mia is haunted by her mother dying on the other side of a door after taking too many sleeping pills, and both her mother and victims of the ritual end up shutting themselves behind doors that their loved ones break down to try to help them.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The plot of this movie would have probably gone differently if Max had told Mia about his wife's suicide note early on.
• The Nothing After Death: When Mia dies at the end, she has a surreal vision where she is first transported to the hospital, but the lights progressively turn off, engulfing her in darkness. This darkness is likely the aforementioned Limbo, taking the form of an unending void of black lit only when another person uses the hand.
• Not That Kind of Mage: The friends argue over whether the hand belonged to a psychic, a medium or a Satanist.
• The Oner: The film's opening scene, consisting of a man named Cole entering a crowded house party to find his brother Duckett, breaking down a door to retrieve him, and getting stabbed in the chest with a butcher knife by Duckett, who then proceeds to fatally stab himself in the face, is depicted in one shot.
• Parting-Words Regret: After humiliating Riley in front of the friend group and him saying he hates her, the last thing Jade says to him before his turn with the hand goes horribly wrong is a sarcastic "Like you’re my favourite person in the world." It's not stated outright, but it's implied that this is how she feels until he thankfully wakes up.
• Self-Made Orphan: Downplayed, possibly. Mia's mother has died before the beginning of the movie. She ends up being tricked by the spirits into brutally stabbing her father in the neck with a pair of scissors; however, we see Jade discover him very narrowly alive, and Mia sees him alive and well when she's transported to the hospital after she dies. It's implied that Jade got Mia's father medical attention in time for him to make a full recovery, and that she's seeing a vision of her loved ones' lives some time after her death, but considering the surreal tone, there is still some ambiguity.
• Sequel Hook: An atypical case where the primary question of intrigue for a potential sequel to mine is thrown out fairly early, rather than at the end. The film has a self-contained and even open-and-shut story concerning Mia, but earlier in the film, the characters discuss the hand as well as the possibility that it has a companion in the right hand of whoever the one they're using (a left hand) came from. Where this right hand is and what it would do are prominent questions brought up by and not explored by the film, leaving an enticing narrative thread open for a sequel to explore that wouldn't require continuing with the same characters.
• Shout-Out:
  • Jade has Crazy Frog's scatting/gibberish from the character's hit cover of "Axel F" as a ringtone.
  • In one scene, Riley falls asleep while watching the Sidemen's second Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? video on his phone; at one point, the video is shown in a dedicated close-up shot. The Philippou brothers are friends with the Sidemen, and have collaborated with them on numerous videos in the past.
  • Mia's nightmare while Daniel stays over is very much like a scene in Hereditary. Mia seeing a figure in the corner of her room parallels Peter imagining a ghost in his corner in Hereditary, and Daniel being assaulted by the spirit before a snap to reality showing Mia in the same position in the room parallels Peter's head being pulled from behind his bed, only for his mother Annie to suspiciously be in the room when he wakes up, denying she did anything.
• Social Media Before Reason: When Cole tries to take Duckett home from a party in the opening scene, his path is blocked by a group of partygoers all with their phones out filming them. They continue filming even when Cole expresses his disgust, orders them to put their phones away, and physically accosts one of them, and they end up distracting Cole long enough for Duckett to grab a butcher knife while his back is turned, and stab him once he turns around.
• Something Only They Would Say: After hearing her mother Rhea talk to her during Riley's possession, Mia, who clearly wants to believe it's her, notes that the voice used the Affectionate Nickname of "Mi", which is what Rhea always used. The more cautious Daniel theorizes that the spirits learn everything about someone when possessing them, so something could have the information to impersonate Rhea effectively.
• Stairway to Heaven: One interpretation of Max entering the elevator at the end of the movie is that this is reflective of him going to the afterlife after Mia accidentally killed him, whilst Mia is left behind in Limbo, a location referred to at least once during the film.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Mia gets a glassy look in her eyes after many of the traumatic events that befall her over the course of the film, including witnessing a possessed Riley destroying his face on multiple tables because of her forcing the group to go over the time limit, stabbing her father in the neck, and being struck and killed by a car.
• Willing Channeler: For the ritual to work, a candle must be lit, and the participant must grab the embalmed hand as if shaking hands with it and say "Talk to me." After the conjured spirit shows up, the participant must then say "I let you in," indicating they consent for the spirit to take control of their body.
• Within Arm's Reach: When Mia is attacked by a demonic version of her father Max, she struggles around and reaches for a pair of scissors on the floor. It gets turned back on her when in the time it takes her to grab the scissors, the real Max has broken down the door to her room and approached her, and she stabs him in the neck with it.
• Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: The teens in this movie feel the typical invulnerability and rebelliousness that come with age, which is why they continue to mess with the spiritual realm despite it being clear that the results are unpredictable each time. Of course, inevitably, one of the possessions turns deadly.

---