Review: Talk To Me – grisly, clever but maybe not quite scary enough

I am sure back in the day we used to play table-top football, stare at photos of Kate Bush and Debbie Harry and moan about school. Things have certainly moved on since then, certainly for the bunch of teenagers we get to meet in Danny and Michael Philippou’s gleefully grisly new horror film Talk To Me. The latest Aussie craze, it seems, is to gather together and let the angry undead inhabit you. Trivial Pursuit seems awfully tame in comparison.

It all centres around a ceramic hand covered in scribbles. Inside the ceramics is the severed hand of a long since dead medium, and that’s presumably where the power comes from. You decide who is going to go next, and the chosen one then gets strapped to a chair while a candle is lit. And then, oh what larks, the chosen one tells the hand “Talk to Me”, at which point a snarling lump of rotting flesh appears.

At which point you are supposed to say “Let me in!” And then the spirit dives in. You squirm a lot, you go red in the face and you hope that your mates release you within the specified 90 seconds – or else the spirit will take up residence permanently. It’s all about the thrill, but equally it’s all about the timing.

And these are the social circles that lonely, grieving Mia (Sophie Wilde) gravitates through as she struggles to come to terms with the apparent suicide of her mother. Also playing the game are her friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and Jade’s kid brother Riley (Joe Bird). Jade’s really not keen for Riley to take the handshake, but Mia unwisely eggs him on – and then gets the shock of her life when her dead mother starts talking to her through him. Even worse, her mother starts hinting that there’s far more to her death than meets the eye. And even worse than that, poor Mia, having done the hand thing herself, simply can’t stop seeing gruesome visions. Meanwhile poor Riley, having come out of his trance, repeatedly smashes his face against the sideboard.

It's all utterly preposterous especially in the second half when the supernatural shenanigans continue around Riley’s hospital bed in a hospital which seems weirdly unstaffed, especially given just how ill he is supposed to be. And yet, as daft as it is, there is something undeniably effective about this gratuitously grisly yarn. Difficult to tell which is worse: the snogging the bulldog scene or the repeated head smashing.

Mia feels – and fair enough – she’s got to do something about it, but the siblings’mum Sue (Miranda Otto) is hardly her number one fan now, and there’s something distinctly sinister about her dad. A better film would have been an awfully lot more scary. So much of this is unpleasant without being particularly chilling, but if you’ve overdosed on the Barbie movie, this might just be your most effective antidote. And the ending (OK, I needed it explained to me) is clever, very clever. And clearly too clever for me.