If not for A24’s wise crush of media coverage, you would have no idea that co-director/co-writer Danny Philippou, with his co-director brother Michael Philippou, had never helmed a feature film before.
“Talk to Me” takes a wonderfully simple premise—what if young people didn’t have to use a Ouija board to communicate with the dead—and transfers that potent energy into a wonderfully simple design, a human hand trapped in a forever handshake, that could be a ceramic mold or an actual severed hand covered in gypsum plaster.
To play the game, party-goers must embrace the hand and whisper ‘talk to me,’ which will reveal a spectral visage, and then the person says ‘I welcome you in,’ and for the next 90 seconds but no longer they experience some of what their spectral visitor felt in life and in death.
“Talk to Me” also introduces a relatable protagonist, Mia (Sophie Wilde), a young woman struggling to move past the sudden death of her mother and the subsequent alienation of her father, who lives with her best friend Jade, Jade’s dorky little brother Riley and their parents.
The practical effects are stellar throughout “Talk to Me,” but it’s the story that really hooks you, especially once Mia makes a terrible mistake with Riley that results in Mia trying desperately to learn more about the origin of the hand before more people die.
Again, it’s impossible to overstate just how confident and impressive of a debut this is from the Philippou brothers, who are just getting started, which is truly the most exciting thing about “Talk to Me,” knowing that this is just their first swing of the bat.
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This article appears in Aug 10-16, 2023.