Talk to the Hand

I can take you to the best horror movie in years

Talk to Me [A24]

Not all great horror movies are actively scary. Some are suspenseful, well written, and dread-inducing, but don’t inspire you to cover your eyes or look away from the screen in anticipation of whatever happens next. Talk to Me isn’t one of those. It’s impressively scary. In between its major set-pieces — one or two of which reminded me of Hereditary, but most of which are so original they didn’t remind me of anything — I found my pulse racing with both fear and the excitement that comes from knowing you’re watching something special.

The premise can best be described as possession as party game, with a group of Australian teens who’ve acquired a ceramic hand that connects whoever holds it and says “talk to me” to a spirit only they can see. If they’re bold enough to complete the incantation by then saying “I let you in,” said entity enters their body until contact is broken with the otherworldly appendage. (The hand’s origins are vague, with the filmmakers providing just enough lore to feel both plausible and unknowable: “The other hand’s just out there…somewhere,” one of the teenagers claims.) Far from a clandestine ritual, each possession is giddily filmed by every phone in the room and quickly posted online. To record something as you experience it, whether a concert or a supernatural phenomenon, is to distance yourself from it and make it less real — a little like watching a scary movie with your hands over your eyes.

They are smart about one aspect of this social-media séance, however: capping it at a minute and a half lest the spirit refuse to leave. Despite losing control of their body while hosting these departed souls, some of whom make no secret of being malevolent, all of them enjoy the experience — the euphoria it induces is an ecstasy somewhere between the religious and MDMA varieties. You can almost imagine the 60 Minutes-style “they call it…” news segment stoking a moral panic about the practice.

Teenagers making bad decisions are one of horror’s proudest traditions, but the adolescents of Talk to Me are a cut above the usual camp-counselor cannon fodder. They’re troubled and shortsighted, but grounding the supernatural in their milieu is sneakily effective. The idea of an embalmed hand that may or may not have belonged to a psychic linking our world with that of the spirits requires some suspension of disbelief, but a group of teenagers using it in the most ill-advised way imaginable does not. Though we watch them play this game several times, we only see the possessing spirit when Mia (Sophie Wilde) makes contact. This eliminates any doubt as to whether it’s real or not, but something about the ritual still seems performative — which is to say that it’s not unlike everything else teenagers do at parties. Talk to Me finds a sweet spot between spectral terror and lived-in authenticity.

The film was directed by twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, better known to their 6.7 million YouTube subscribers as RackaRacka, who both had below-the-line credits on The Babadook. Unlike fellow Aussie filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s overvalued cult classic — her follow-up, The Nightingale, was a much more accomplished expression of her brutal sensibilities — their feature debut more than lives up to the hype. A quick glance at their YouTube page suggests that this is a marked departure from their prior work. The platform is rife with viral horror videos, and the emergence of We’re All Goings to the World’s Fair, Skinamarink, and now this suggests that elevated horror may soon be supplanted by YouTube horror as the trendy subgenre du jour.

Time will tell whether that ends up being a good thing or not. It’s certainly unlikely that any movie seeking to replicate the effect of Talk to Me succeeds anytime soon. This is horror of the highest order, the kind that leaves you feeling both giddy and unsettled — almost as though you’ve allowed some strange force in and aren’t sure whether you want it to leave.