In the Flesh: Talk to Me

“It occurred to me,” rasps Richard Harrow (Jack Huston) in Terrence Winter’s series Boardwalk Empire, “the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don't.” It’s a chilling line, and a perfect description of the cold-hearted, dead-eyed meanness at the heart of Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me, a film intimately concerned with teenage alienation and cruelty in the emotional wasteland of the modern Australian suburbs. Jade (Alexandra Jensen) doesn’t want Mia’s (Sophie Wilde) friendship anymore. Daniel (Otis Dhanji) doesn’t want Jade’s affection. Mia doesn’t want her father Max’s (Marcus Johnson) comfort in the wake of her mother Rhea’s (Alexandria Steffensen) passing. None of the things we’re told make life bearable are working as they should, and what’s worse is that nobody around us cares. They pull out their cell phones when we suffer psychotic breaks. They slink away when we’re injured or frightened. They cut us off when we get too sad to be of any entertainment value, and in the end we’re left alone with our own aching sense of longing, snatching at any promise of connection that comes within reach.

That ugliness is woven through Talk to Me — even the title is a plea for human interaction — right from the jump. As Cole (Ari McCarthy) walks his severely unwell brother Duckett (Sunny Johnson) out of a house party, the other guests begin recording Duckett with their phones. Cole’s outrage doesn’t stop them. They only retreat before him, phones raised, ghoulishly transforming Duckett’s suffering into content. Hayley (trans masc actor Zoe Terakes, giving a really exceptional supporting performance as a posturing, hardened party boy) does the same to Mia, and even more cruelly to Daniel, whose humiliating experience with the supernatural hand around which the film’s plot revolves they gleefully upload even as he begs them in tears to delete it. Then there’s the hand itself, a plaster facsimile of human touch allegedly containing the real thing, originating from nowhere in particular, passed from bearer to bearer and used as a party trick or short-lasting drug. Sort of like occult poppers. Everything is deferred. Everything is a proxy. Everyone is struggling to act as though they have no needs, no fears, and no anxieties.

As cleverly constructed as Talk to Me is, though, when it gets to the finish line it seems to get cold feet. All its brutality dries up in an instant and it swaps the nightmarish ending toward which it gestures for a much tamer and more conventional one, even allowing for the deliciously creepy final few shots. Still, the Philippou brothers deliver an otherwise lethally nasty flick, especially when it comes to those possession sequences, all massively dilated pupils and strained and garbled voices reciting poetry in French, begging for death, offering succor. A glimpse of the spirit world evokes a revolting combination of Society and Possessor, the shriveled and mucous-coated dead sucking at Riley’s (Joe Bird) naked body in a red-saturated void. It’s a haunting film, and the questions it raises thrill and terrify in the context of our own desensitized and brutal age. What if it’s not just that no connections exist between us, but that every attempt to affirm their existence only further mutilates our defenseless and isolated souls? Talk to Me probes that desperate anxiety beautifully.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist.