“Let me in.”
That’s the mantra of the characters in Talk to Me. It’s also an implicit demand by the brash young Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou, looking to join an inner circle of neo-genre specialists. Their knock at the door is more literal than most: The key prop in their feature debut is a freaky embalmed hand, severed neatly at the wrist and carried around in a backpack from house party to house party like a prized bong.
You know what they say about the devil’s playthings: Supposedly taken by force from a Satanist with medium-like abilities, the hand’s outstretched fingers tempt a group of South Australian teenagers who should know better into opening themselves up to fleeting, transient incidents of demonic possession. These sessions are then duly recorded and posted to TikTok and other apps; think the Nyquil chicken challenge, but more dangerous.
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The hand is a great prop, at once tactile and uncanny; it also reaches back to the timeless myth of the monkey’s paw, with its seductive promises of godlike power and punchlines of severe, cosmic irony. Be careful what you wish for, it says silently. You’re gonna get it.
By taking a durable myth and rewiring it into a millennial cautionary tale, the Philippous look to be one of the biggest winners of this year in film; buoyed in equal measure by strong reviews and a stellar see-it-if-you-dare ad campaign, Talk to Me opened over the weekend to a robust $10 million gross. It’s the second-biggest total in A24’s history, and it’s earned more than even widely hyped predecessors like David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny did in their first weekends. The brothers’ status as prodigiously accomplished YouTube provocateurs via their billion-views-and-counting channel RackaRacka completes the conceptual package: At a moment when TikTok’s quick-hit style and glib syntax have infiltrated cultural spheres from fashion to comedy to political activism, their film serves doubly as a critique of reckless Gen-Z exhibitionism and a ruthless exploitation of its aesthetics, with iPhone footage skillfully integrated into the storytelling.
From its slow-burning prologue set at a raging house party to a bone-crunching centerpiece that seems destined to be watched by squeamish viewers through their fingers (or maybe blocked out altogether), Talk to Me displays a keen sense of craftsmanship; where even a spooky-season hit like last year’s Smile felt thrown together, this movie has been built. It’s a ferocious piece of filmmaking, and yet its brutality belies a certain sense of familiarity. Of course, it’s a fine line between rip-off and homage, especially in a genre where filmmakers are celebrated for their allusions: The unapologetic nods to Cat People in It Follows or The Shining in Robert Eggers’s The Witch were typically taken by critics as examples of the filmmakers’ savvy or respect for tradition.
Hence the mangled kangaroo that momentarily mesmerizes high schooler Mia (Sophie Wilde) on a nighttime drive home, an image that inevitably calls to mind Get Out’s symbolic roadkill deer. And ditto the actress’s wide-eyed pantomime of terror a few scenes later as she locks fingers with the cursed hand, a mirror of Daniel Kaluuya’s entry into the Sunken Place. Fair play, but Mia’s subsequent description of feeling like a passenger within her own hijacked consciousness hews so closely to Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning script that it suggests something beyond reverence.
Obviously, there are worse models to emulate than Peele, who’s not only cultivated his own instantly recognizable seriocomic style but has also so far sidestepped the siren song of IP (notwithstanding his stint hosting an unfortunate update of The Twilight Zone for CBS All Access). Like the sentient, carnivorous UFO in Nope, Peele currently hovers above the fray, making genuinely elevated horror films that have avoided (or surpassed) the skepticism aimed at certain of his more earthbound peers. For directors like Aster, Eggers, and Jusu (who’s getting the Criterion treatment for Nanny in October), the flip side to near-instant canonization is serving as broad targets for writers looking to take them—and their champions—down a peg. In a zesty 2019 essay for The Los Angeles Review of Books, writer Scout Tafoya hammered away at the towering rhetorical edifice—and teetering intellectual infrastructure—of “elevated horror,” suggesting that it’s an old-fashioned case of hype over substance. “The horror genre never had a problem that needed to be solved by someone like Ari Aster,” writes Tafoya. “What it has always had is a respectability problem, and the term ‘elevated horror’ is a way to con critics into praising something.”
Surely, a pair of filmmakers who happily refer to themselves in interviews as “feral” and fight on the undercard of a Logan Paul boxing event aren’t chasing prestige or plaudits, and tonally, Talk to Me is closer to something like Zach Cregger’s brute-force B-movie, Barbarian, than Peele’s intricately intellectualized “social thrillers.” But whatever their pretensions—or lack thereof—the Philippous are keen observers of a marketplace where it pays to attach some kind of pedigree to terror, and underneath its adroit shock tactics, Talk to Me makes a fairly significant concession to the elevated-horror model by hinging its plot on a case of capital-G Grief. The reason Mia is so susceptible to possession is because she’s heartbroken over the death of her mother, whose overdose may or may not have been an act of self-harm. Where her friends are just chasing a hedonistic thrill, she’s trying, if at first only unconsciously, to reconnect with a loved one—a difference that ends up dooming her above the others and rerouting a story line bristling with unpredictability into a fairly conventional trajectory.
In 2021, Parul Sehgal published an essay in The New Yorker called “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” which argued that contemporary literary and cinematic narratives have started leaning so heavily on revelations of preexisting psychic injury that tragic backstories have become crutches or, worse, clichés. “Unlike the marriage plot,” she writes, “the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?).” Sehgal might as well be describing Mia, who, despite Wilde’s sensitive, physically adept acting, remains narrowly defined by her loss. At this point, it’s probably harder to think of a contemporary horror movie that doesn’t feature a protagonist who rejects Sehgal’s description of being “self-entranced, withholding, giving off a fragrance of unspecified damage”; the archetype persists in everything from The Night House to Smile to The Boogeyman. The trope has become so ingrained that it’s started to bend back in on itself: David Prior smartly satirized the trend in his excellent 2020 thriller, The Empty Man, where the protagonist’s buried trauma is revealed as fully fictitious and engineered from without for his own solipsistic benefit—a twist with a wicked sense of humor.
A case can be made that the Philippous are similarly playing with conventions: Like M. Night Shyamalan way back in The Sixth Sense, they understand the power of mixing randomness with specificity, which is why the Chatroulette style of early scenes is so unnerving. The ghosts don’t just appear out of nowhere to stare down the players: They’re lonely, confused, and abject, each in their own nightmarishly ordinary way, and also collectively bewildered that their sojourns in limbo are being used for entertainment. But instead of making the callow, adolescent cruelty represented by the game and its players its subject, Talk to Me casts its dramatic lot with the damaged Mia, locking into a set of predictable plot points. For all their play with subjective point of view and sound design, the filmmakers never really succeed in making Mia’s confusion contagious; even when she’s at her most lost, it’s easy to see where the movie is going.
It’s too bad because the scariest movies—the ones that have most recently truly elevated horror—don’t just lead us down the path or drag us to hell. They make us wonder whether we even want to get to our destination, or whether we’re in safe hands to begin with. Rather than Aster and Jennifer Kent—who employed the Philippous on set a decade ago for her own rookie triumph, The Babadook—the best analogue for the brothers’ aggressive intentions and internet-honed skill set may be Ben Wheatley, whose online shorts in the early 2000s reveled in a similar sense of DIY spontaneity and who proved a quick study in translating the style to film. Wheatley’s 2011 masterpiece, Kill List, was surely derivative—it wore its ’70s folk-horror references on its robed sleeve—but its nastiest shocks seemed to come out of nowhere; they were genuinely blindsiding, and they stayed with you whether you wanted them to or not. Talk to Me holds you in its grip until it’s over, but that’s it. On the strength of pure craft and ambition, the Philippous have earned entry into the elevated-horror club; maybe as they grow and develop as directors, they’ll renounce their membership or even stake out territory beyond—and above—the in crowd.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.