If the best horror movies are driven by a sense of empathy, then Talk to Me is an exemplar. It’s the feature film debut of Danny and Michael Philippou, best known for the homegrown anarchy and DIY gore of their hit YouTube alter-egos RackaRacka.

Yet what is really impressive about Talk to Me is its sense of maturity. The duo’s RackaRacka content is clearly driven by a love of gory Troma exploitation, or maybe early period Peter Jackson. Here, the breakout filmmakers do a superb job of extending emotional generosity to a relatively large number of characters.

What that means is we’re pulled even more inexorably into a sense of terror once it arrives, and it does so immediately with a harrowing cold open. The groundwork here is about believability, with a supernatural curse smuggled into a deft allegory for grief, peer pressure, drug taking, teenage anxieties and social media exploitation.

Sophie Wilde is outstanding in the central role of Mia. She’s grieving the loss of her beloved mother Rhea in mysterious circumstances and her father Max is closed off. Meanwhile, Mia’s friendship with Jade (Alexandra Jensen) is mottled with tension, owing to her history with Jade’s current boyfriend, Daniel (Otis Dhanji).

Mia, Jade and Jade’s younger brother, Riley (Joe Bird), attend a party that is being driven by a viral phenomenon. The premise is simple: hold onto a disembodied ceramic hand for no more than 90 seconds in a ceremony that’s initiated by candles and the words, “Talk to me”. On uttering the words, “I let you in”, the participant seemingly becomes possessed by wandering spirits. The host Hayley (Zoe Terakes) is contemptuous of Mia and unsympathetic as to her circumstances. Nevertheless, Mia volunteers for the ceremony and undergoes the spectral equivalent of a drug trip. Is it a psychosomatic response driven by her recent tragedy, or maybe a psychotropic one initiated by the candles?

The Philippou’s play on the front foot establishes the threat as a supernatural one. This is the film’s triumph, contextualising the outlandish within the recognisable world of adolescent hierarchies, suburban homes and the ever-invasive presence of phones that capture every facet of the body-contorting possession scenes, replete with dilated pupils and distorted voices. If the threat takes a leap of imagination, the physical world conceived by the film is immediately recognisable.

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Mia is immediately hooked by the experience, and even more so during a second ceremony held at Jade’s house. This is where the group makes the fateful decision to allow the naive Riley to get involved. When the deceased Rhea appears to speak through Riley’s body, to the extent he holds on for more than 90 seconds, things go south. There’s a good reason why participants are warned not to risk letting someone, or something, in permanently.

What happens next is truly horrifying, an energetic spectacle of body-mangling viscera that calls back to the directors’ YouTube roots. Yet the film has the chutzpah to go deeper, structuring itself as a prolonged reaction to grief and loss. Mia’s culpability makes this a morally complex watch. After all, she prompted the ill-fated Riley to hang on in order so she could talk to her mother. But is it Rhea with whom Mia is communicating? Is Mia’s intense despair blinding her to the motivations of possibly malicious spirits?

The Philippous juggle a lot of these thematic plates throughout. The film is both an intimate, realistic study of loss and a more wide-ranging story of campfire legend, a Monkey’s Paw-aping yarn of a curse that plays with lives and claims souls in the process. This primarily comes back to Riley, whose spirit is fragmentarily shown in a terrifyingly fleshy version of hell. It’s one of the most nightmarish depictions of a liminal space seen in recent years.

The movie honours these long-held genre traditions, largely in the hideous, vacant-eyed apparitions that appear to Mia and channel the spirit of the deadites from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. Yet it’s also a coming-of-age story of a young woman hollowed out by her mother’s absence. It’s primarily Mia’s story, but all the other characters register strongly. Jensen’s Jade is beset by sympathy for her friend and jealousy over Mia’s standing with Dhanji’s Daniel. In fact, it is this tension which generates one of the film’s memorable gross-out images. Bird’s Riley is visibly tremulous and sympathetic, so keen to fit in that what happens to him next is genuinely discomfiting and upsetting. It’s more than surface horror: we feel connected to the plight of innocent people.

The film ably triangulates all these compelling individuals. There’s also a strong turn from the veteran Miranda Otto as Jade’s mother, and Mia’s surrogate mother, Sue, who is all too quick to close ranks around her family once danger rears its head. There are scares in Talk to Me, frequent, alarming and visceral ones. But it’s the feeling of primal, human desperation that really lingers in the mind. We can search for answers, or we can be misguided enough to invent our own ones, with profound, far-ranging consequences.

Special features

• Dual format edition including both UHD and Blu-ray
• HDR with Dolby Vision
• Audio commentary with Danny and Michael Philippou
• Audio commentary with Emma Westwood and Sally Christie
• Talk to Them: new interview with Danny and Michael Philippou
• Conjuring Demons: interview with producer Samantha Jennings
• Beautifully Grotesque: interview with cinematographer Aaron McLisky
• Contagion: Kat Ellinger on Talk to Me
• Behind the scenes of Talk to Me: archive featurette
• Behind the scenes – No Spoilers: archive featurette
• Deleted scenes
• Cast interviews
• Crew interviews

Limited edition contents

• Rigid slipcase with new artwork by Ann Bembi
• 120-page booklet with new essays
• Six collectors’ art cards

On Blu-ray, 4K and 4K UHD Blu-ray on June 23rd / Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen, Joe Bird, Otis Dhanji, Miranda Otto / Dir. Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou / Second Sight Films, Altitude Distribution / 15

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