San Diego Comic-Con 2023: Talk to Me, by David Bax

There was once a time, not that long ago, when having a press badge at Comic-Con meant multiple opportunities to check out a movie ahead of its release. The World’s End, Snowden, Blair Witch… I saw all of these and had to turn down just as many screenings due to a busy schedule. Comic-Con’s not like that anymore and you’re lucky if you get one screening a year (not counting the actual film festival at Comic-Con, which is a whole other thing that offers a wonderful opportunity to see some works of true independent passion). I’m still kicking myself for skipping last year’s screening of Barbarian; how fun that would have been to see with a Comic-Con crowd, absolutely the most jazzed people in the world. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again this year. Danny and Michael Philippou‘s Talk to Me was the lone movie I got to see this year but, if we’re going by quality and not quantity, it was more than enough to make the trip to San Diego worthwhile.
Not to be confused with Kasi Lemmons‘ 2007 biopic of American radio and television host Petey Greene, Talk to Me is a fully Australian horror movie. By fully Australian, I mean that there’s a kangaroo on screen in the film’s opening minutes. Yet its milieu–irresponsible teenagers–and its horrors–of the possession variety–are universal ingredients in the genre’s heady stew.
Outside of the wonderful Miranda Otto, the cast is young, new and unlikely to be familiar to most American viewers. Sophie Wilde gives an incredibly, hopefully career-making performance as our protagonist, Mia, whose difficult relationship with her widower father (Marcus Johnson) leads her to spend much of her time with best friend Jade (Alexandre Jensen) and Jade’s younger brother Riley (Joe Bird). Otto plays Jade and Riley’s mother.
Talk to Me is not a found footage film (thank God) but the Philippou’s could have gone that route given that these characters seem constantly to be recording everything, including a late night party game that allows the holder of a petrified hand to engage with the spirit of a dead person. This might be a comment on or just an honest picture of Gen Z kids–I myself am too old to know–but the “always on” nature of the friend group at the film’s center is an added level of self-consciousness to the already fraught and vulnerable experience of being a teenager. The movie wisely draws as much of its tension from Mia’s precarious social and familial positions as it does from the threat of being possessed by an angry ghost.
There’s a whole plot to Talk to Me that has to do with who the specific revenant is that Mia encounters and a ticking clock to save Riley from an even worse fate. But the details of that narrative started to fade pretty quickly after the viewing. What lingers is the boldness and vigor of the filmmaking and the resulting scares, which are imaginative and shock-inducing. This movie will inhabit your very being. As long as you welcome it in.