The buzzy Aussie horror Talk to Me is being marketed & distributed by A24 in the US, which is likely setting misguided expectations for it as an “A24 Horror” film.  The independently produced demonic possession flick does dabble in themes typical to A24 Metaphor Horror, but its scares are much more direct, brutal, and ultimately conventional than the atmospheric slow-burn creepouts audiences have come to expect from the studio.  In truth, Talk to Me builds a solid bridge between two prominent horror trends of the moment: Grief Metaphor horror (Hereditary, The Babadook, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, etc.) and social media peer pressure horror (Unfriended, Truth or Dare, Host, Ma, etc.).  It falls somewhere between the artsy atmospherics of A24’s tastes as a curator and the trashier gimmickry of the Blumhouse brand, with the only apt comparison point on the former’s roster being last year’s bloody Gen-Z satire Bodies Bodies Bodies – another tonal outlier.  In either case, Talk to Me is novel enough in its mythology and brutal enough in its unflinching violence to earn a spot somewhere in the modern horror canon, even if it treads in the liminal waters between the genre’s artsiest & trashiest contemporary impulses.

Talk to Me‘s take on the horrors of social media is much more sharply defined than its demonic possession tropes or its ruminations on grief.  It’s effectively a “TikTok challenge” horror, except instead of doing a silly dance or chomping on a Tide pod, teens pressure each other to communicate with the dead.  Their doorway to the spiritual world is a ceramic hand: an instantly iconic prop that summons wayward ghouls when you shake it in greeting and say, “Talk to me.”  Going a step further, the teens invite those ghouls to possess their bodies for the LOLs, with all of their friends and casual acquaintances filming their freaky behavior for short-term video content.  So, the demons that sneak into the real world through this open doorway aren’t directly tied to the cultural menace of social media, but the youthful desire for attention from peers on social media is what keeps the door open long enough for things to get out of hand (literally).  The way those house party seances are lit by the searing, hungry eyes of smart phone cameras is often way more chilling & upsetting than the grotesque gore gags that result from the teens encouraging each other to play with powers they don’t comprehend.  There are much tighter stomach knots tied by the embarrassment of what the ghouls make the teens’ bodies do on camera than by the lethal torment they devise in private.

The social media peer pressure scares of Talk to Me are bookended by much more expected, routine methods of modern horror.  On the front end, our doomed lead (Sophie Wilde) is given a standard-issue reason to push her communication with the dead a little too far, to her friends’ demise; she’s grieving the death of her suicidal mother.  On the back end, the demons that grief unleashes act in the exact way you’d expect in a modern losing-grip-with-reality metaphor horror, give or take one standout hallucinatory vision inspired by The Shunt.  There’s no reason to hold it against any horror film for following the pre-set beats of its genre, though, especially not when the central mythology is this concisely clever and the violence is this excruciatingly cruel.  Talk to Me is clearly a step above recent by-the-numbers mainstream horrors about mental health crises like Smile or Lights Out, even if it’s not typical to the glacial abstractions synonymous with A24 branding.  At the very least, director-brothers Danny & Michael Phillipou’s shared background as shock value YouTube pranksters shows in the film’s sharp eye for social media menace, and their commitment to making sure that menace results in some truly gnarly on-screen violence is exactly what makes this the feel-bad movie of the summer.

-Brandon Ledet