It’s a séance of sorts. At booze-fuelled late night gatherings, Aussie teenagers take turns to do the thing: while tied to a chair, you clasp an embalmed hand, and invite whoever materialises to occupy your body. Go over 90 seconds, and you’re in danger of never coming back.
We know from the first scene of Talk to Me what dangers this might entail, when a possessed boy at a party stabs his own brother, then himself in the brain. The film jangles with scuzzy, anything-could-happen menace in that Hereditary way, while laying out its own implacable rules like another modern classic, It Follows.
This may be one notch shy of that league – but it’s still an undeniably head-turning debut from Danny and Michael Philippou, goofy twins from Adelaide who made their name with horror-comedy spoofs on YouTube. Talk to Me ignited a bidding war at Sundance and sold to A24 in the US and Altitude in the UK; the brothers are already in talks to direct a reboot of Street Fighter.
The hook here is how boisterously they handle these bouts of temporary possession, with revoltingly impressive make-up effects and a ticking clock. But what sustains it from jump to jump are the tensions they drum up between a well-drawn coterie of characters.
Two years after her mother’s death by suicide, Mia (an outstanding Sophie Wilde) is trying to get out of her own skin, which explains her fixation on this macabre game. Ringleader Hayley (Zoe Terakes) irrationally hates her, and even Mia’s best pal Jade (Alexandra Jensen) has reasons to be jealous, since her virginal boyfriend Daniel (Otis Dhanji) and Mia have history.
