Hello film fanatics, it’s Slick Dungeon! If you’ve already done the Barbenheimer and you are still itching to go out to the movie theater you might be wondering what to watch. There’s a tight little indy horror film called Talk to Me I recently saw and I’m here to give you my thoughts on it. There will be some mild spoilers in this film so if that kind of thing bothers you, put your cursed hand in your pocket, light a candle, head out to your theater and see the movie before coming back here to see if Talk to Me is anything to talk about.

Review

Still with me? Great. On the surface level, this film is similar to a lot of other horror films. It’s a cursed object film where a group of teenagers go too far with an object which allows them to see and interact with the dead. If that’s all this film was, it wouldn’t be much to write about and it would be like any old film where a bunch of crazy teenagers find a Ouija board or something like that.

The interesting thing here is the cursed object, a hand encased in ceramic with etchings all over it, becomes an addiction to the group rather than just a one time lark. The film is Australian and the teenagers also have a bit of a different vibe. Sophie Wilde puts in an absolutely brilliant performance covering a range of emotions from grief, loss, addiction, loneliness to determination, suspicion, and fear. She’s never not believable here even in the scenes which are played just for scares to ratchet up the supernatural elements.

The film is somewhat similar to Smile or It Follows in that the horror here is passed on from one person to another and the protagonist sounds more and more delusional as the film progresses. But unlike those movies, in this one, the group of friends know the supernatural things happening here are 100% real. For the most part, the group wants to cover up what happened rather than do anything about it because they’re afraid of getting in trouble themselves.

There are some absolutely brutal scenes involving violence and self harm so do be warned about that before you watch it. But the shocks of the film are well timed and don’t seem overly gratuitous. It’s bloody but it’s not bloody simply for the sake of showing us gore. And the violence really is surprising here and extremely effective.

The end also wraps up in a way that is pretty terrifying and it stays with you. There are some slow points of the film but those moments are useful in informing the characters and it makes for a well rounded movie.

In the end, this one lets the audience play into what you can usually expect from supernatural horror but then subverts it just enough to keep things interesting. And while it is brutal in the violence, it is subtle in the storytelling. All of the characters feel like real people with real lives and real histories.

It’s also refreshingly short for a movie in 2023. This one is around 90 minutes and they use the whole time to tell us a good story rather than packing in an extra thirty minutes of filler.

For me, this just misses the 5 star mark because a few of the effects don’t quite work for me and there are a few times where I do find it hard to understand the main character Mia’s motivations for what she’s doing. But those are pretty minor issues and it might just be me.

If you need a good independent horror fix though, you could do a lot worse than this one.