Talk to Me

The hand is grey, cased in ceramic and covered in the scribbled names of people who have held it before. Grip it, say “talk to me”, and a dead person appears in front of you. Say “I let you in” and they climb inside, and your friends have ninety seconds to film your eyes going black before someone pulls the hand away. Michael and Danny Philippou, Australian twins from YouTube, built their first film around this party game, and the best idea in Talk to Me is that the game is fun. It is a good horror film for about an hour, a decent one after that, and we would still send you to it.

Mia (Sophie Wilde) is a teenager whose mother died recently. She has moved in with her friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen), Jade’s younger brother Riley (Joe Bird) and their mother Sue (Miranda Otto), and she is the one at the party who volunteers first. Aaron McLisky shoots the possession scenes handheld, lit by lamps and phone torches, and stays close on the face of whoever is holding the hand. The pupils go, the voice changes, the friends whoop and count down and push their phones in closer. Cornel Wilczek’s score is a low electronic pulse, and Geoff Lamb cuts to the phones often enough that you see the footage the way the kids will see it. It looks like the best night of their lives.

Wilde is the reason it works. Mia is not a scream queen or a sceptic but an addict in the making, and Wilde plays the second go as more frightening than the first, because this time she wants it. There is a moment, which we will not describe, when the hand shows her something she wants to see, and we felt our stomach drop, because her face moved from terror to relief in the time it takes to say a name, and relief was plainly the wrong thing to be feeling. There is no vanity in the performance.

The scene the film will be remembered for comes at a second party, when Riley, far too young for any of this, insists on a turn. We watched it with a hand over our mouth, and we are not proud of that. Bird is a child, and the Philippous know what it does to an audience to put a child in that chair. What keeps the scene from being a stunt is Miranda Otto in the aftermath, arriving as a mother who has been told nothing and does not need to be. Jensen is good in a part that mostly asks her to be furious at Mia, and Zoe Terakes, as Hayley, keeps the hand and recites the rules like a bored bartender.

Bethany Ryan’s production design keeps the houses plain: rented-looking suburban rooms with bad carpet and the television always on, so that the hand looks wrong on any surface it is set down on. Anna Cahill dresses the teenagers in the clothes teenagers wear, which is rarer in horror than it should be.

Then the last half hour arrives, and the script, by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, goes soft where it had been hard. Rules that were sharp for an hour become negotiable when the plot needs them to be. Mia begins making the choices the story requires rather than the ones she would make, and there is a stretch where characters explain the hand to each other that we could have done without. The ending itself is a hard, cold thing and we will not spoil it.

Possession films tend to arrive with a priest, a crucifix and a lesson. This one has none, and is closer to a film about drugs than to The Exorcist: the danger is not that the devil wants your soul but that you will want to go back. Australian horror has been good on grief since The Babadook, and Talk to Me sits in that company without pretending to be its equal.

At 95 minutes it does not outstay its welcome. Watch it with the lights off and the sound up, and leave your phone in another room.