MOVIE REVIEW: TALK TO ME

I’m all for assisted suicide, but I wouldn’t go as far as putting together an entire theatrical feature on it. The Philippou brothers’ 2023 A24-backed production Talk to Me is a gamble on that liberal after-school special preachy nonsense, and it pays off well enough thanks to the fact that the film was shot in Australia. I honestly don’t think this film would have been worth a watch if it had been filmed in the States or featured any U.S. cast members. The only U.S. voice I recognized in the end credits was the MC Sadistik (whom I saw support Cage at The Roxy a decade ago), who made an appearance on an otherwise Gen-Z-catered soundtrack that would have sounded horrible without the wordsmith’s inclusion. Sophie Wilde stands out as the lead, Mia, a troubled teenager who ironically lost her mother to sleeping pills and mental illness. She copes with this by attempting to graft herself to her friend’s family, and as the events of the film unfold, this coping mechanism falls apart in front of her eyes.

Talk to Me features a monkey’s paw of sorts, except instead of granting wishes, this hand becomes a conduit to talk to and be possessed by restless spirits. The Zoomers in the film do as they always do: find some way to abuse power. And in this case, instead of it being direct substance abuse, they use the wannabe monkey’s paw like an OTC. I understand that UK Grime culture was responsible for further polluting U.S. Hip-Hop music; that’s all here in the Aussie film, but it’s like a fair trade-off given the way that the U.S. manufactured opioid crisis has affected the world, and Talk to Me is an excellent way to look at this issue and how it affects the Zoomers and the X-ers that gave birth to them. Even if a majority of it is in metaphor, this unofficial liberal after-school special still rings bells in the points that the Philippous are doing their best to bring home. I’ve said on radio shows and on my own podcast that Zoomers are the most desensitized generation, yet balance it out by being overly sensitive.

The film begins with a dying kangaroo (yeah, this is shot in Australia) waiting to get put out of its misery on a roadway. For some reason, Mia, the main Zoomer, decides to zoom around the kangaroo while her best friend’s little brother, Riley (portrayed by Joe Bird), whom she’s chaperoning (yet also wants to sleep with, but I’ll get to that later), is being more of an adult than her and telling her to run it over for a mercy kill. This theme repeats itself with Mia’s own mother and eventually Riley, who ends up in the hospital after an encounter with the knock-off monkey’s paw. Even Mia’s father gets in on the shenanigans as he gets stabbed in the neck through a feminist act of patricide and is found later on in the film, bleeding to death in agony, yet still clinging to life.
Last I checked, only four states recognize assisted suicide for aging U.S. senior citizens.

I don’t know how they do it in the U.S., but I could smell the fetid corrosion of dead skin hanging off this demonic character past its prime towards the end of the film, to the first female who looked like a bloated drowned victim, but really only turned out to be a hog of an old fart who couldn’t help herself from sucking the toes of an underage boy like she used to eat ladyfingers when she was alive. So not only do I support the assisted suicide message in the Philippous’ film, but I also strongly support the ageist idealizations subliminally relayed through this film, in a way not as blatant as Mad Solar’s X, but still just as truthful, especially when viewing Talk to Me in the U.S. where the populace is flooded with old fools with too much access to excess. I mentioned the scene where an underage male gets his toes sucked by a whale of a senior citizen. Well, that horror sequence started well before that instance as Mia ends up practicing the 80/20 rule and ends up sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend, who is obviously homosexual, as one of the demons pointed out earlier in the film, but females are naturally delusional, so they let Chad beard them both out so he can keep his sexuality on the DL.

The sequence starts with Mia dreaming of making out with this guy, so not only is she a bedwench, but she also sleeps with both her best friend’s brother and boyfriend in the film. Further promoting the sexually inappropriate behavior of Afrocentric females that, according to this film, is an epidemic not only in the U.S. but across the whole Anglosphere. I don’t approve of this, but I’ve grown to learn not to fight the tide. Project Pat said it best on Ghetty Green, “she don’t wanna be saved,” and I found the time to enjoy the self-described kinks and sensuality displayed on the screen. The U.S. is backward in regards to selling a dream to females that their worth appreciates sexually as they age. Countries outside the U.S. are more practical in their media, and I didn’t mind watching these teens go at debauchery like an episode of Skins or Euphoria with Harmony Korine as a guest director. I saw better visual effects earlier this year in Malum, and hell, even the Afrocentric female lead in that film held herself with more class than Sophie did portraying Mia. But hey – I say let the Zoomers burn themselves out as the Boomers age themselves out, and those in between make their own mistakes to take themselves out the race.

This didn’t even need to be a horror film; Talk to Me could have just been a drama film. The horror aesthetics hold this Philippou feature back, to be honest. Other than that, Talk to Me serves as a great think-piece to bring about more widespread legalization of assisted suicide facilities. Many other viewers may like to focus on the metaphor for opioids and the real problem of mental health that has become a buzzword, but I haven’t seen a film tackle the topic of assisted suicide before or seen a picture come at the problem of the aged-out populace this well since X, and with Sophie Wilde being introduced to U.S. audiences through this film for us to continue to fawn over for years to come, once again I must tip my hat to A24 for allowing the widespread distribution of this otherwise 2022 picture that would have continued to fly under the radar here domestically. And thanks to the Philippous, I just might consider making a trek Down Under for my future travels if Sophie Wilde’s are a common archetype of Aussie citizens.

Score : 3.5/5

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