A24 continues to deliver the goods with the best horror movie of the year.

Score: 4/5

The horror genre is not my favorite, so maybe my view doesn’t mesh with those who live and breathe scares, but this year has been weak with quality offerings. Like most of the summer movie season, nothing has felt like it delivered. What has arrived has felt stale or middling. Well, thank you directors Danny and Michael Philippou, Talk to Me is excellent! There is something about the energy of the movie and the restraint of not trying to explain every lore detail that makes this movie fun.

While I say fun, this movie hits that R rating hard, face smashing into tables and walls hard. That said, it doesn’t feel like a body horror sick-to-your-stomach fest like Evil Dead Rise early this year. It has restraint in the right places. If there is one thing that brings down the movie just a bit for me is that the plot isn’t doing anything too drastic in the ghost possession tropes to the point where the ending isn’t shocking, but a natural conclusion. At least to me. For a lot of horror movies, a big twist at the end is what makes or breaks a movie. For this one, I didn’t care that it felt more on the obvious side.

So, what is Talk to Me about? Talk to Me centers around teens doing something absolutely stupid for fun, and the damage it can do to someone who shouldn’t be playing around with it all. The stupid thing? Locking hands with a ceramic embalmed hand, and saying two phrases, “talk to me” and “I let you in.” These actions trigger controlled temporary possessions from spirits, and the young adults can’t get enough of the social media aspect of posting what weird stuff happens when anyone tries this. This movie one hundred percent spoke to me as a commentary on teen abuse with drugs and alcohol use. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, or someone becomes addicted.

What follows is both. Which only get worse when it involves ghosts. What makes this movie cleverer than say Insidious, is the movie doesn’t spend much time at all explaining the motivations of ghosts or a spirit world. It’s more primal. It’s don’t screw with ghosts you dummies! While the first half of the movie is more a balance between the absurd fun party feel and the tense when-is-this-going-to-go-off-the-rails feeling, the second half slowly devolves into ghost possession tropes. Since the movie didn’t spend time getting super exposition heavy though, that didn’t bother me as much as it could have. I was invested in the characters and wanted to see how it all played out. By the way, the end may have been predictable, but I still enjoyed that final scene. All of this is elevated by a cast that was just fun to watch. While the only actor I recognized was Miranda Otto (Lord of the Rings wooh!), the cast of younger lesser-known actors felt authentic and never pulled me out of the movie or tone that production was going for.

All around, Talk to Me was a horror movie that put a smile on my face. The concept felt fresh, it captured a frantic energy, and while the ending was more typical horror it didn’t sour the overall film like is the case with many horror movies.