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Talk to Me is about a girl too squeamish to put some still-twitching roadkill out of its misery one evening and too generous in spirit not to go out of her way to give her friend’s forgotten-about brother a ride home getting mixed up in the comparatively ill-judged business of demonic possession. As it so often goes in the movies, 17-year-old Mia (Sophie Wilde) isn’t, at least not initially, seeking the spirits out. They find her. Shit-stirring classmates Hayley and Joss (Zoe Terakes and Chris Alosio) recently acquired through a friend of a friend an embalmed hand. It’s rumored to have once belonged to a medium and confirmed, after a few whirls, to have possessive powers. If you light a candle and confront it with a couple magic commands (“talk to me”; “I let you in”) while clasping its palm in your own, your body gets temporarily enthralled by whichever spirit has been stirred as a player in what is amounting to a dangerous game. The duo has been bringing the talisman to parties — one of which Mia attends — and turning its tricks into a sort of Spin the Bottle-esque pastime. It doubles, with everyone’s phones dutifully whipped out, as a chance at virality whose appeal rests, in large part, on outsider debate whether everything captured by camera is real or not. 

The spirits have thus far tended to gravitate to the tame, like making their possessees admit crushes or kiss the slobbery family bulldog a little too long. Nobody engaging, as a result, is as apprehensive about the whole thing as they ought to be. It’s the sort of playing with fire you worry is going to go haywire fast. There’s the shocking prologue opening the movie that suggests as much will happen; there are also the bad feelings we get after sitting through a goofy early-movie montage where these teens put the hand to the test with marathonic fervor. (One’s first instinct is to think it’s a little alarmist to believe our youngest generation would do something with potentially deadly consequences for the sake of potential online notoriety, but since stranger things have happened, you never know.) 

The kids think they’ll be just fine as long as their summonings don’t last any longer than 90 seconds. (Word has it that those which do run the risk of permanent possession.) But it’s only inevitable someone will take it too far. And it feels inevitable that that someone becomes Mia, who’s still mourning her mother’s unexpected death by suicide two years ago and these days finding much-needed solace at her best friend Jade’s (Alexandra Jensen) house, where her mom (a scene-stealing Miranda Otto) and brother (Joe Bird) are more and more feeling like the supportive family members her emotionally distant father (Marcus Johnson) is struggling to be. After Mia’s first try with the hand — and then a few more — she becomes addicted to what it brings her: almost-indescribable full-body highs; a new intimacy with the spirit world she thinks, after a while, is bringing her closer to the answers surrounding her mother’s death she’s long been yearning to hear. 

From Talk to Me.

Once someone gets seriously hurt, though, the film’s directors, Danny and Michael Philippou — twin Australian creatives who rose to fame as YouTube duo RackaRacka and here are making their joint feature-filmmaking debut — struggle to keep up the effectively weaponized tension of the film’s first act. In addition to trying to find a resolution in the wake of that injury, which expectedly proves to have scary spiritual aftershocks, Mia also becomes progressively mobbed with visions that come courtesy of the hand. Most of them involve her mother, or maybe not, teasing her with tastes of emotional closure she can’t help but want to make a full meal out of. The Philippous are studied when it comes to doling out suspenseful horror set pieces; the early ones, where the teens are turning dangerous handshakes into a sport, are very well done. The filmmakers also have a good feel for the lived-in dynamics of the characters: Jade and Mia’s friendship, made especially uneasy lately by Jade dating a naïve Christian boy with whom Mia used to herself be involved; the tough-with-a-side-of-humor love Mia can expect from Otto’s single-mother character, who is the type to warn one of her kids half-seriously that she’ll “punch him in the face” if he touches drugs at the party she’s certain he’s attending later under her nose.

But the Philippous flounder as they delve into Mia’s grief — into what is also obviously an extended allegory for drug use and the damages it can wreak in one’s periphery. Though it’s hard not to sympathize with Mia — something testifying to the excellence of what feels like a star-making turn from Wilde — the surface-level writing around her sorrow feels largely like a hackneyed deploying of the “trauma plot” on which the film’s distributor, A24, is sometimes criticized for being over-reliant with its horror offerings. And the film’s racial implications become increasingly stark in a way I probably too generously like to think the Philippous didn’t intend. Every character of color in the movie in some way causes trouble, while the white characters are relegated to wide-eyed innocents getting mixed up in said trouble.

The consistently good thing about Talk to Me is that it’s always the sort of horror movie over which you practically want to yell at the screen — something one generally is not moved to do unless the movie, in the moment, has some sort of grip. (I sometimes noticed that I was practically restraining myself from audibly groaning at the screening I attended.) The movie indeed maintains a firm grip as you watch it; it also loses it almost as soon as its chilling final image segues into the closing credits. Talk to Me is good at what it’s going for, not a lot else. Someone behind me as I left the theater exasperatedly told the person they came with that it was “deadass the best demonic-possession movie I’ve ever seen.” They can’t have seen many.