Long before A24’s Talk To Me released in cinemas worldwide, I was already convinced it would be a hit. Back in April, I wrote a piece touching on how it could be the scariest movie of the year. While I can’t confirm whether or not this is true since I obviously haven’t seen every horror movie coming out this year, I can say for sure that Talk To Me is the scariest film of the summer, and possibly one of the most frightening films I’ve ever seen.
I’m a horror fan to my core. I love it when a movie moves me and terrifies me at the same time, which is why A24’s catalog is my jam. When it comes to horror, the distributor tends to pick films that are both emotionally layered and deeply jarring, leaving your nerves shot from hours of disturbing visuals and palpable dread. Talk To Me hit the mark exactly. It was so disturbing that afterwards I couldn’t stop pacing around, trying fruitlessly to work the adrenaline out of my system.
I don’t want to get into spoilers because people should watch this film as fresh as possible, but I’ll try to explain exactly what is so harrowing. Talk To Me focuses on a group of teenagers who have possession of a ceramic hand. Allegedly, inside it is the actual hand of a medium. Hold the hand, and say “talk to me”, and you’ll see a ghost. Say “I let you in”, and you get possessed. You’re only supposed to hold it for 90 seconds, otherwise, as one character explains, they’ll want to possess you forever. Holding the hand gives you an incredible high. The main character, Mia, holds it for longer than that. (She’s going through some shit, including dealing with the grief of losing her mother.) I’m sure you can predict what happens next.
It’s a pretty obvious allegory for drug use, and one of the writers of the movie said as much to GamesRadar. The seed of the movie’s plot came from when he saw footage of one of his neighbours experimenting with drugs for the first time and having a bad reaction, and all his friends were standing around him, filming him and laughing at him. That’s in Talk To Me too, and highlights the terrifying reality of young people doing drugs when they’re ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of overdosing, or ignorant of the importance of helping the people around them have safe, pleasant experiences. It also depicts the haunting presence of abusable substances when you, like me, tend to like them a bit too much.
More than that, though, it’s an incredibly gory film – and I say incredibly, as in, the gore is incredible. There were points where I gasped out loud and looked away from the screen because where most movies would cut away from something so horrifying and grisly, Talk To Me kept going. It does not shy away from being difficult to watch, instead leaning into being intolerably visceral and uncomfortable to keep your eyes on. It’s very rare to watch horror movies these days that successfully execute gore that doesn’t look fake, and this film is shockingly good at that.
Mark my words, if you’re a horror fan, you don’t want to miss Talk To Me. It’s well-paced, runs a tight hour and 35 minutes, has you genuinely caring about its main characters, and will fill you with painful dread the entire way through. My recommendation is to watch it, then go home and lie in a warm bed with everything you need to soothe your shot nerves afterwards, because you will be stressed.