Talk To Her Film

[Latisha Gervase]

Notall great horror movies are actively scary. Some are suspenseful, well written, and dread-inducing, but don\u2019t inspire you to cover your eyes or look away from the screen in anticipation of whatever happens next. Talk to Me isn\u2019t one of those. It\u2019s impressively scary. In between its major set-pieces \u2014 one or two of which reminded me of Hereditary, but most of which are so original they didn\u2019t remind me of anything \u2014 I found my pulse racing with both fear and the excitement that comes from knowing you\u2019re watching something special.

The premise can best be described as possession as party game, with a group of Australian teens who\u2019ve acquired a ceramic hand that connects whoever holds it and says \u201Ctalk to me\u201D to a spirit only they can see. If they\u2019re bold enough to complete the incantation by then saying \u201CI let you in,\u201D said entity enters their body until contact is broken with the otherworldly appendage. (The hand\u2019s origins are vague, with the filmmakers providing just enough lore to feel both plausible and unknowable: \u201CThe other hand\u2019s just out there\u2026somewhere,\u201D one of the teenagers claims.) Far from a clandestine ritual, each possession is giddily filmed by every phone in the room and quickly posted online. To record something as you experience it, whether a concert or a supernatural phenomenon, is to distance yourself from it and make it less real \u2014 a little like watching a scary movie with your hands over your eyes.

They are smart about one aspect of this social-media s\u00E9ance, however: capping it at a minute and a half lest the spirit refuse to leave. Despite losing control of their body while hosting these departed souls, some of whom make no secret of being malevolent, all of them enjoy the experience \u2014 the euphoria it induces is an ecstasy somewhere between the religious and MDMA varieties. You can almost imagine the 60 Minutes-style \u201Cthey call it\u2026\u201D news segment stoking a moral panic about the practice.

Teenagers making bad decisions are one of horror\u2019s proudest traditions, but the adolescents of Talk to Me are a cut above the usual camp-counselor cannon fodder. They\u2019re troubled and shortsighted, but grounding the supernatural in their milieu is sneakily effective. The idea of an embalmed hand that may or may not have belonged to a psychic linking our world with that of the spirits requires some suspension of disbelief, but a group of teenagers using it in the most ill-advised way imaginable does not. Though we watch them play this game several times, we only see the possessing spirit when Mia (Sophie Wilde) makes contact. This eliminates any doubt as to whether it\u2019s real or not, but something about the ritual still seems performative \u2014 which is to say that it\u2019s not unlike everything else teenagers do at parties. Talk to Me finds a sweet spot between spectral terror and lived-in authenticity.

The film was directed by twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, better known to their 6.7 million YouTube subscribers as RackaRacka, who both had below-the-line credits on The Babadook. Unlike fellow Aussie filmmaker Jennifer Kent\u2019s overvalued cult classic \u2014 her follow-up, The Nightingale, was a much more accomplished expression of her brutal sensibilities \u2014 their feature debut more than lives up to the hype. A quick glance at their YouTube page suggests that this is a marked departure from their prior work. The platform is rife with viral horror videos, and the emergence of We\u2019re All Goings to the World\u2019s Fair, Skinamarink, and now this suggests that elevated horror may soon be supplanted by YouTube horror as the trendy subgenre du jour.

Time will tell whether that ends up being a good thing or not. It\u2019s certainly unlikely that any movie seeking to replicate the effect of Talk to Me succeeds anytime soon. This is horror of the highest order, the kind that leaves you feeling both giddy and unsettled \u2014 almost as though you\u2019ve allowed some strange force in and aren\u2019t sure whether you want it to leave.

Captured on April 25, 2015, the day of a major peace rally and later uprisings in Baltimore, Maryland following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. Gray died from spinal cord injuries sustained while in police custody.

According to the 2015 Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Research Center, American millennials born between the years 1981 and 1996 are less religious than older Americans. The study affirms that millennials are less likely to ascribe to traditional forms of religious observance, but remain religious in their own right. They are finding and creating new spaces to have different kinds of conversations that are not offered in traditional religious contexts.

From issues pertaining to gender and sexuality, abuse and trauma, hip-hop culture and music, gentrification, race and racism, patriarchy, and more, the film explores a rising phenomenon of religious and spiritual shifts among the largest generation and one of the most influential demographics in the U.S, Black Millennials.

Nikkolas Smith, a native of Houston, Texas, is a Master of Architecture recipient from Hampton University. After designing theme parks at Walt Disney Imagineering for 11 years, he is now an ARTivist, Concept artist, Children's Books Author, Film Illustrator (Space Jam 2, Black Panther 2, Judah and the Black Messiah, Black Panther Wakanda Forever) and Movie poster designer (Black Panther, Soul, Beale Street, Southside With You, Dear White People, Stranger Fruit).

He is the author/illustrator of the picture books "The Golden Girls of Rio" (nominated for an NAACP Image Award), My Hair Is Poofy And That's Okay and World Cup Women . He is also the illustrator of #1 NYT Bestseller The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, I Am Ruby Bridges, Black Panther Wakanda Forever: The Courage To Dream, and That Flag.

Since 2018, the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life has conducted more than 50 oral history interviews with Black Millennials on their faith and formation. Watch the full oral history interviews with these Black Millennials also featured in gOD-Talk.

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital by recognizing the influencers, creators, brands and organizations on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and more. gOD-Talk won the Audience Honor in Cultural Institutions, Facebook Partnership.

You completely ignore the fact that film and comics were relatively born and grew up together, playing off each other as they aged. As comic panels developed into strips and then books attempting to capture the magic of the silver screen, so animation developed in film to capture the imagination of the printed page. BOTH media, in their infancy, relied on head-on, eye-level, plain-Jane action.

You are bold in your praise of the hard work and determination of the film industry in creating a language all their own without resorting to borrowing! Except terms like frame, shot, focus, subject, angle, lighting and composition WERE borrowed from still photography! And photographers borrowed most of those from painters! Humans beings excel at adapting language to suit their needs.

One aspect has to do with the communication between reviewer and reader. We need a shared language, and for whatever reason, film terminology is easier to make sure that what I want to communicate is transmitted through the review. I have recently been talking a lot about the 180-Degree Rule, which is a necessary rule for film but in comics it can be broken (and is) a lot more often without detriment.

My sentiments exactly. Not to suggest that the medium has not developed its own unique creative language, which we all acknowledge. But rather that some degree of commonality will always spill over and be reflected in both method and language, as story-telling mediums [plays, radio, comics, film/TV] all borrow/learn from and challenge each other.

I wrote an essay on Winsor McCay and the influence between comics and film in the early 1900s that was published in ANIMATION a few years back (it also helpfully summarizes Donald Crafton, Kunzle, and some of the others who opened this can of worms in the 1970s):

I think is more related to 3D VS 2D thinking. The more you draw, the more you become sensitive to the smallest of the detail.

I prefer when comics are made by using movie language. And I grew up by reading comics made in traditional way (No movie language). One of my favourite comics (The Smurfs) is done in old way, but Peyo was also a great artist).

Set in the workaday suburbs of Adelaide and the teens who live there, Talk to Me centres on a party trick with a difference. Tough kids Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio) have somehow acquired an arcane artefact, the mummified hand of a spirit medium that not only allows the user to see ghosts, but to allow themselves to be possessed by one. Being bored Aussie kids stuck in the doldrums of suburbia, they use it for kicks and TikTok clips.

Danny: We were exploring things that scared us and Daley like, say, mental illness, which runs in our family. Our grandma took her own life and depression runs in our family. And the idea of that affecting you because of just being born like through that bloodline has always just been so scary. That scared us.

Michael: Because it happened during Covid our casting process took up two years; it postponed everything. We just wanted everything to feel as authentic and real as possible, Even in the rehearsal process we were going through lines and trying to find things that fit naturally in their mouths, and the actors could change things if they wanted to and had the freedom to do that.

Michael: Oh, we love everything about the suburbs of Australia. That world and the characters are based on people that I know and the way that they talk, and encapsulating all that was so important and shooting in Australia was so important. Every project that I ever do, I wanna bring back and shoot at least some of it in Australia.

3a8082e126