The Best Movies of the Year: Talk to Me Builds a Horror-Universe Microcosm

I’ve been thinking about Talk To Me for five months. That’s how long it’s been, roughly speaking, since I walked out of an early screening of the film dazzled by what Danny and Michael Philippou created with their debut feature, a teen horror flick with dread that runs deep and a dark sense of humor that buoys the film’s breathless intensity. The film kind of knocked me backwards when I saw it, so much so that when it came time to write a review just days later, I was a little lost, finding it hard to articulate just how the film did what it did so well. 

After all, those who clicked with Talk to Me will find plenty of love: Great performances, great humor, wonderful horror sequences, practical effects and a sense of youthful energy thrumming through the whole piece that’s both exhilarating and provocative. But after seeing the film again, I think I’ve finally figured out what impressed and dazzled me so much all those months ago. It’s not the rapid-fire storytelling or gruesome setpieces. It’s the way the film manages to build an entire horror universe in microcosm, without ever stopping to dump buckets of lore and ground rules all over its audience.

This begins from the very first frame, as we see a chaotic party where a young man is looking for his brother, another young man named Duckett. We know nothing about Duckett, and we’ll never get to know him as a character, because within moments he’s dead for reasons we don’t yet understand. From a basic, horror narrative standpoint, we know that this scene is there to throw us off balance, to give us a jolt of violence and unpredictability that gets us to the edge of our seats within the first few minutes, but Talk To Me doesn’t stop there. Duckett isn’t just a one-off guy who dies and then goes away. Like the ghosts central to the film’s hook, he lingers, becoming a key point in the way the film builds out its mythos. 

The narrative then shifts to focus on Mia (Sophie Wilde) and her friends, and for a moment Duckett seems gone for good. We learn that Mia recently lost her mother, that she’s having a hard time coping, and that she’s very interested in a series of videos her friends are making that seem to suggest communication with ghosts. Here again, the film doesn’t lay it all out for us. It simply shows us Mia, a typical teenager adrift in her life, watching a video and saying “I want to see if it’s real.”

Already, in just a handful of moments, we see the brilliance of Talk To Me‘s pacing, and the way it seeds little moments of lore in among its story of teens searching for a rush that just might come back to (literally) haunt them later. As Mia confronts the film’s MacGuffin, a ceramic-encased severed hand that’s a conduit for the dead, we’re granted precious little concrete information about it. Mia’s friends Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio) know just enough about the artifact to make it work in a seemingly safe way, but even they admit that they’re really only doing what was previously explained to them. That tenuous grasp on the “rules” of the horror, coupled with brief snatches of germane dialogue and the way information seems to float through the air via shared videos and texts, speaks to the film’s authenticity in its quest to portray a teenage experience. You never know everything about the party you’re going to, either before or after the night in question. You just know what you felt, what you saw, and what you heard, and that’s all you can cling to. 

As the film goes on, what Mia sees and feels shifts in dramatic, frightening ways: An encounter with the hand that seems to reveal her mother’s ghost goes very wrong, leaving one of her friends in mortal danger and Mia herself haunted by ghosts that are no longer tied to the ritual of the hand, but walking free in her daily life. A desperate Mia starts searching for the key that will unlock this creepy little puzzle, going all the way back to Duckett’s surviving brother for answers, but even here, we only get snippets, shreds of potential truths that may help, or may just be what someone heard. Through these conversations, Duckett himself evolves in the scope of the film from a kind of Patient Zero to an even more enigmatic and dark figure, a ghost from the past who can’t be reasoned with, that guy at the party you heard about but never really met. 

When it was first released, Talk To Me caught some flack for these half-realized bits of lore, as some accused it of shaky logic and storytelling that never quite synced up. But as Mia falls down deeper into an abyss of death, manipulation and chaos over the course of the film, Talk To Me makes it clear that its logic is never really meant to be sturdy. Where did the hand come from? No one knows for sure. Why did Duckett have such a bad reaction? No idea. Why does this particular malevolent spirit seem so intent on destroying the lives of Mia and her friends? We just don’t know, just like we don’t know how the hand wound up encased in ceramic, why it has so much writing on it, or who figured out that 90 seconds is the optimal window for communing with the dead through the hand’s grasp. 

But here’s the thing: None of that missing knowledge makes the film feel incomplete. Like It Follows before it, the film creates a whole, tactile, terrifying world out of scraps of lore, never giving us the whole picture but nonetheless making us feel like we’re getting more than the film actually gives us. Some of that has to do with the technical specifics of the filmmaking, but the film’s greatest success is not practical, but emotional. To be a teenager is to be thrown into the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, without a real roadmap to get you from one to the other and back again. Everything is felt so intensely, so honestly, that it can feel like you’re trying to wrestle some great supernatural monster to the ground, and no matter how hard you fight, you’re losing. If you only had some sense of the rules, some key to unlock a master plan, you could win the fight, but the universe doesn’t give you a master plan. Instead, you get only snatches, only glimpses of what might work in your chaotic little world where your friends might betray you and leave you to the monsters. It’s a time of excitement, yes, but it can also be a time of grasping at straws, of reaching desperately for meaning in a world that often feels too shallow for all the heavy feelings you’re carrying. 

By rooting its story in a world of malicious spirits and strange ghostly artifacts that we can never fully understand, Talk To Me literalizes that experience with a potent horror narrative, capturing something essential about the process of growing up while also building a promising horror universe that’s now set to continue with follow-up films. Mia’s story is intimate, but her world feels truly vast and full of dark corners she can never fully illuminate. That makes Talk To Me one of the best genre films of the year.

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.