It’s a brilliant device for a modern horror story (Daley Pearson is credited as the concept’s creator), and a franchise waiting to happen (in the case of horror, that often means a fruitful idea is intact, like when “Final Destination,” “The Purge,” and “Saw” first debuted.) “Talk to Me” could easily lead to a higher body count or a more directly spooky story in its sequels. But the game begins small here with a sincere pitch that aims for the gut—this first installment is about watching someone be possessed by horrible ideas of grief, and the damage their decisions inflict on their loved ones.
There are rules for how this dance with death can be done “safely,” and in a snappy montage that mixes partying with possessive play, we get a great sense of what extreme fun it can be for Mia, her friends, and the hand’s current owners, Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio). But everything shifts in a nifty, nasty instant when one of the spirits that overtakes young Riley turns out to be Mia’s mother who died by suicide two years previous. Or at least the spirit claims to be. A freaked-out Mia forces this one communication with the dead to go on too long, putting Riley in a coma with many self-inflicted gashes on their head, an attempt by the spirit to kill his soul and fully control his body.
The second half of “Talk to Me” suffers from being yet another recent horror movie built on the trauma of loss, but it gets a special amount of layers from Sophie Wilde’s excellent performance. It’s not just about Mia trying to hold onto contact with her mother, but her need to not lose her new family, that of Jade, Riley, and their protective mother Sue (played with dry toughness by Miranda Otto) in the process. We ache for Mia to be OK, especially since she’s such a bright personality—her constant yellow wardrobe always pops, and she has sweet scenes with Riley, like when the Philippous hard-cut to them early on bursting out Sia’s “Chandelier” during a night-time car ride. Wilde exemplifies a feverish, youthful need to balance both the pains of the past and a jeopardized future, and by trying to hack the hand’s magic, she isolates herself from reality in the process. “Talk to Me” could have been more rote without such voluminous work, but Wilde’s tragic interpretation—her big-screen debut—is one for the horror movie history books.