Spoiler Alert: Talk to MeThe American media company and film distributor, A24, has grown a great reputation among horror fans for backing some great films from the genre over the years. With Talk to Me, it's found yet another winner as this Australian horror flick has been generating a ton of buzz since its release. The company's been at the forefront of some amazing films over the years, so it's not unsurprising.
Known for backing movies from various genres, A24's success is underscored by the fact that its films have received a total of 49 Academy Award Nominations to date. With the memorable imprint it has left on film so far, it may surprise some to know that the company has only been producing and distributing films for a decade now. Known as the King of Indie films, the A24 success story owes a lot of that to its eye for picking terrific horror films.
The company outbid the likes of Universal Pictures at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival to secure the international distribution rights for Talk to Me, and this has proven to be another fantastic move. The film is being hailed as one of the scariest new horror films around, with amazing performances, a brilliant story, great effects, and excellent direction all driving its success so far. Here are our picks for the scariest moments from A24's Talk to Me.
10 Psychological Toll
Talk to Me centers on a group of teenagers who follow a YouTube sensation to their own doom. When videos begin emerging of an object that can possess and communicate with spirits, a group of friends, Mia, Jade, Riley, Hayley, and Josh throw a party to try it out. The object is a creepy embalmed hand that allows the user to meet a spirit when they light a candle, hold the hand, and say, "talk to me." This is followed by "I let you in," which allows possession to occur. The candle must be blown out before 90 seconds to "close the door" and get rid of the conjured spirit.
Despite having a ton of actual scares, the film's greatest success is how it bores under the skin with psychological horror. Between measured restraint, wildly effective tension building, and themes like peer pressure, grief, guilt, and teenage propensities for following dangerous online trends, these all make the film viscerally disturbing.
Backed by a great young cast led by emerging star, Sophie Wilde, and its Australian setting that gives it a fresh and diverse setting, Talk to Me is packed with effective and terrifying horror scenes. However, its crowning achievement is that it's one of the best modern examples of nuanced psychological horror out there today.
9 Opening Scene
The film's first-time feature directors, Danny and Michael Philippou are twin brothers, and previously built up a cult following with their YouTube channel, RackaRacka. The channel was known for the pair's clever and brilliantly executed comedy-horror videos. However, with the resounding success of Talk to Me, they now surely have a bright future as mainstream directors too. Despite their young age and relative inexperience, the Philippous showed remarkable maturity and restraint with how they handled the gore aspects of the film.
The film is rated R and features some intense gore scenes. However, rather than approach these like amateurs aiming for cheap shock value, the brothers used gore tactfully and sparingly to enhance scenes and imbue them with a disturbing nature instead. The film's opening scene is a perfect example. As it follows a man looking for his brother at a rowdy party, the scene builds with an unsettling atmosphere, culminating in a gory stabbing and suicide scene. Without any further context, the scene brilliantly creates mystery and sets the tone for the terrifying thrill ride to come.
8 The Roo
This being an Australian film, it wasn't unsurprising that a kangaroo showed up in it. However, the scene made for an intense moment too, so it was no mere cliché. Early on, the lead character, Mia, and her friends are reveling in youthful immaturity as they joyride and hang out on the top of their car's sunroof. There's a very jumpy and unsettling moment when the car strikes something.
With some great tension building, we wait to see what it was and find that it was a kangaroo. While this should have dissipated the tension as the one consolation is that it's not a person, the film instead ramps the tension up after. Again, gore is used effectively to make the scene as uncomfortable as possible for audiences while the animal lies suffering, in a twisted and unnerving way.
7 Those Dark Eyes
As a horror that largely fell into the possession subgenre, this one didn't shy away from these scenes. As soon as the rituals are completed, these scenes immediately burst out at you in a frightening way. While they often feature jarring accompaniments like chairs being flung backward, creepy voices, and other frightening moments, one thing marks these scenes more than others.
Whenever one of the characters is gripped by a spirit possessing them, there's an immediate blackening of their pupils. It's already bad enough that these moments are so visually unsettling, one of the reasons the film's earned rave reviews. However, since the possession scenes are usually also the scariest ones, audiences learn early on to fear the characters' pupils turning black, so this device imbues more tension into these scenes too.
6 First Possession Scene
The build-up to the first possession scene already seizes the film with some deeply atmospheric tension. The backstory of Mia's duality in being a teenager just trying to have fun with her friends while simultaneously mourning her mother's death keeps an air of expectancy about the movie as the main tropes play out.
By the time we get to the first possession scene, we've already seen some great gore, tension, and sparingly used jump scares, amid the backdrop of Mia's pain. The creepy hand, YouTube videos, and the explanation of what the hand does work as amazing devices to keep viewers on the edge of their seats as they tensely wait to see an actual possession. When it happens, the moment is jarring, as it hits instantly and with no holding back.
5 Riley's First Possession
Riley is one of the main characters in the film. As the youngest of the group, he carries a greater air of innocence and vulnerability to him than any of the others. This trope works well since he also suffers through the worst of the film's terrorizing entities. While he volunteers to experience possession, this fact cleverly plays on teenage peer pressure, since he just wants to impress his friends.
As his possession hits, it appears to be the spirit of Mia's dead mother. This causes her to force the possession beyond its time limit with devastating consequences. The spirit soon gains strength and takes over Riley in a terrifying way. It causes him to self-harm as he bashes his own head in and even tries to rip out his eyes. The scene's intensity and gore are like a rollercoaster for viewers as it emotionally tosses you around and is unrelenting while it lasts.
4 Riley's Ghost
The unfortunate Riley winds up hospitalized as a result of his traumatic possession. While Mia does her best to try and confront the fallout from her decision to push his possession beyond the time limit, she has her own nerves shattered along the way too as she starts being haunted by the apparent spirit of her mother.
This eventually leads Mia to try and get to Riley in the hospital. Believing she has to kill him when she gets to him, the moment is horrifying. Riley isn't really Riley anymore but takes the form of a spirit that looks more like a rotting corpse than anything else. The moment, aside from being scary, is tragically horrifying too since it proves just how deeply in the grip of the spirits Riley really is.
3 Mia's Haunting
Mia's desperation to contact her mother, Rhea, who died by suicide, makes her one tortured character even before her haunting begins. When that haunting does start, she begins having ghastly visions of the spirit of her mother. These scenes lean on some great techniques with lighting, mixed with excellent effects for its budget, to make them very freaky.
With the spirit often appearing behind Mia, beside her, or coming out of shadows, it messes with your nerves and the tension is relentless whenever Rhea's spirit shows up. Again, elements of atmospheric tension building, psychological horror, and straight-up ghostly scares, are used to perfection by the Philippous, immersing viewers and forcing them to fear the dark, shadows, and anything that goes bump in the night.
2 Final Scenes
By the time the film nears its end, viewers are left fraught with the effects of the unrelenting pace. By this point, Mia is also a wreck, her experiences and the toll of it all pushing her mind to breaking points. As she devolves into practically deranged states, the film's climax ramps this all up.
Following the advice of her mother's spirit, Mia begins to turn violent, believing her actions to all be necessary. This causes her to do things like stab her own father, try to kill Riley, and eventually, herself too. The film's amazing conclusion dramatically builds to a haunting crescendo, that punches above its weight, while it cleverly unveils the poignancy of its opening scenes in the process.
1 Riley Torture Scene
In what is almost unanimously seen as the film's most disturbing and terrifying scene, Mia is given the ability to see what is supposedly really happening to Riley. In the vision, she sees that Riley's soul is surrounded by demons who mercilessly torture him.
The aim is to destroy his soul, so the spirits can possess and inhabit him completely. Sadly, what this means is that Riley has his body tortured in some twisted ways. The scene unsettles you more than any else but is again a testament to how restrained and mature the directors were with how they approached the film.
In an interview with Dexterto, here's what they had to say about why they actually chose to shorten this now infamous scene.
“So originally, it was like a two-and-a-half, three-minute scene. And we saw a lot more, there was a lot of stuff that we filmed that we put in. If you go through the scene frame by frame, you’ll see some interesting things. It originally wasn’t like that – that was what we came up with. We wanted to just kind of glimpse that side of things and then get out of there, as opposed to stick there.”
There we have it. Talk to Me is already gaining a cult following among horror fanatics, and for good reason. A brilliant debut for the Philippous, the film is packed with nuance, a gripping story, and amazing scares that's been leaving even season horror fans rattled.
It's no wonder the film currently holds a 94% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. With the possibility of a sequel in the air, horror fans can't wait to see what comes next from the Philippous, since what they have birthed with Talk to Me,may now possibly become a new horror franchise.
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