Fangoria co-owner Tara Ansley told us repeatedly on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) to see Talk to Me in the theatre, and advised us to come into it as cold as we could. And that cold ceramic hand hits hard; this handshake with the dead is the stinging slap of gore and horror you know is coming, but yet can’t quite predict. Telegraphed to an almost ridiculous degree, the film’s initially slow momentum takes a concept that could be funny, trite, but ultimately forgettable, and transforms it into something genuinely dreadful, eliciting a range of feelings in the viewers. Neither a handshake nor a slap, Talk to Me closes its hand into a fist and delivers a solid punch to the gut that upends the very foundations of reality, ruthlessly blurring the lines between the worlds of the dead and the living.

It’s not that teenagers meddling with spirits of the dead for fun is a new idea. It isn’t, not at all. No. Directors Danny and Michael Philippou, and writer Bill Hinzman play with your basic horror tropes, and bring them to a terrifying but familiar place – an embalmed, porcelain-coated hand, reputedly belonging to a deceased medium is used casually and carelessly to interact with the dead, with serious repercussions. In place of a Ouija Board, the cursed artifact is passed around at parties; teenagers, spurred on by peer pressure and an obsessive fascination with the macabre display that ensues, call upon the hand to possess them, for the sheer hedonic rush of it. Following the horror precedent of a roadside harbinger of doom, reminiscent of the graphic death of Charlie in Hereditary, and the deer roadkill from Get Out, there is a pivotal moment at the beginning of the Australian Talk to Me in which the protagonists stumble upon a suffering kangaroo on the road, and Mia tries but can’t find it in herself to put it out of its misery with her car. These early scenes provide character introduction, but more importantly hint at the darkness to come; this film gets ugly, fast, as it is made clear that unanticipated consequences come from well-meaning actions.

The idea of a hand with powers beyond human comprehension is also nothing new, though this film offers a variation on previous models. Legend has it that a hanged murderer’s hand can create a Hand of Glory that renders people motionless when they see it. A Monkey’s Paw can grant three wishes- in the absolute worst ways possible. The hand in Talk to Me opens up a portal to the spirit world, allowing a tormented soul caught between life and death to possess a human host. Aside from the universal appeal of occult practices, holding hands with this cursed object has another draw as it simultaneously puts the user into an altered state of spiritual elation, as Mia — a protagonist mourning the second anniversary of her mother’s death — describes. Mia’s backstory is explored through memory and montage. Mia has an emptiness and longing for connection. She uses the hand to escape this, if only briefly- to not only feel better, but also find deeper meaning, and an understanding of the events that led to her mother’s death. The answers uncovered may be precious truths, or, more likely, malicious lies that will drag her toward actions that ultimately hurt her, and destroy her remaining relationships. After the initial ungodly high, she becomes fascinated with the hand primarily because it allows her, for a fleeting ninety seconds (the time it is deemed safe to be possessed by the hand before you lose yourself to the control of the spirits), to be reunited with her beloved mother, or at least, an entity reminiscent of her mother, to predictably horrific results.The draw to connect with her once more causes Mia to exceed the allotted time, jeopardizing her relationship with her only friend, and throwing the young boy she considers a brother into the tormented grasp of the spirit world.

Like all forms of media, there are many ways to read a horror film.The obvious metaphors are there. As mentioned, the hand is first a drug experimented with by irresponsible teenagers, before it gets, for lack of a more apt phrase, out of hand. Seen through some of the more graphic scenes in this film, the euphoria induced by the hand can also be interpreted as a symbol of sexual experimentation. It is portrayed as a pubescent rite of passage seeped in peer pressure, as one after another volunteers to touch the hand and invite the spirit into themselves, with dramatic consequences, and often accompanied by an orgasmic spectacle for the teenage crowd of onlookers. 

The hand, passed around among friend groups and brought out at parties, can be seen as symbolic of social media: the reference to viral trends and online spectacle-making platforms like TikTok come to mind as the teens record the possessions on their phones, traded around for popularity’s sake. Along with a total disregard of future consequences, the teens show a distressing lack of empathy towards the peers they manipulate and pressure to undergo the invasive ordeal. Cautionary tales of social media’s addictive, self-delusionary and sometimes destructive nature as demonstrated through the teen’s documented encounters with the hand are told through a lens of the unreliable narrative. 

There is also a commentary implicit in the narrative about the dangers of ignorant people meddling with powerful tools they do not understand until it is too late. Like Pandora’s jar, once opened, it becomes impossible to put the evils back inside. Further, this film critiques the human need to interact with perversity and death, to tempt fate and succumb to temptations, amid extensive backdrops of graphic horror porn. Fans of this genre go to movies in part for gratuitous gore, but we stay for explorations of our collective human tragedy, interspersed with ridiculous frivolousness. We enjoy vicarious experiences of fear as epic bloody scenes are splayed out on the screen, as well as the uncanny, such as a disembodied hand enthusiastically passed around among teenagers like a joint at a party. In this way, Talk to Me does not disappoint as it takes us along for a ninety minute journey, far longer than the altered state brought on by a ninety-second handshake, as we encounter vicarious trauma, and grapple with alienation and the drive for connection and belonging. The screen allows us this exploration of pressing existential questions from a safe distance, leaving us exhausted from a profoundly disturbing and cathartic experience.