The Current Cinema - TALK TO ME (Danny & Michael Philippou, Australia, 2023) gets some attention

Mia (Sophie Wilde), Talk to Me

I used to say that the Australian cinema lacked an instinct for the popular. By which I meant  that the bread and butter of so many nation’s cinemas - crime and other genre stories, adaptations of popular novels, the use of pop short stories of the kind that used to appear in journals like the Saturday Evening Post or in pulp fiction – rarely attracted our film-makers. (Godard once stole a Donald Westlake novel and Truffaut adapted David Goodis and William Irish among others, just saying.)

That no longer applies. We do have crime stories and Indigenous film-maker Ivan Sen, especially with his Jay Swan movies and TV series and now his superb Limbo, has made genre film-making his own. Now, a lot of entry-level film-makers gravitate towards horror, one of the staples of film industries passim. That’s not something I’ve tried to keep up with, not something that the film festivals keep up with and now that the AFI’s annual screenings of anything that pays the entry fee seem to belong to the past, it’s doubtful if many people at all keep up with this mostly near-subterranean activity. 

 

"violent self-destructive tendencies when delved into by kids"

People do know, if you want to go back a bit, Wolf Creek (2005) and they do know The Babadook (2014). But for instance, who knows about or saw Wyrmwood (Kiah Roache-Turner, 2014) or its sequel Wyrmwood Apocalypse (Kiah Roache-Turner, 2021). Just the people who stock JB Hi-Fi’s shelves for the most part. Tribeca last month screened You'll Never Find Me (Indianna Bell & Josiah Allen). I guess there are some like Bloodshot Heart (Parish Maltifano) screened in the Fantastic Film Festival, but its website is currently giving no info. The recent Sydney Film Festival screened  Late Night with the Devil (Colin Cairnes & Cameron Cairnes) a co-production between Australia and the United Arab Emirates, in Richard Kuipers  Freak me Out section. There are heaps more and you see my limited acquaintance with them. I assume somebody is keeping a record somewhere, even if it’s just for tax purposes. 

 

Which in a haphazard way brings me to Talk to Me a film whose genre origins remain almost totally unknown to me though I could hazard a guess and say that the twins who made it, Danny and Michael Philippou have seen The Exorcist and The Shining more than once. No such claim is made in the Press Kit just a sentence from the Directors’ Statement: “We’re very inspired by smart psychological horror films in recent years that reflect current society but with a classic lens. These movies are not just entertaining but evolve the form by respecting the audience’s intelligence.”

Shake hands with the Devil

 

Such respect might be why this film amongst all the other unknowns got part-funded and screened by the Adelaide Film Festival. The main funding seems to have been provided by Causeway Films a company devoted more generally to putting quality on the screen and the backer of Jennifer Kent, Rodd Rathjen and Goran Stolevski among others. Talk to Me is also getting rather a lot of media attention and a much wider release than is usual. My goodness even as I write its being discussed on ABC Radio National Breakfast and is the ONLY film reviewed (3.5 stars awarded by Jake Wilson) in today’s hard copy version of the Sydney Morning Herald. Then again there seems to be only one other film opening this week the Finnish WW2 drama Sisu.

 

Danny and Michael Philippou, the Press Kit says, “are best known as online global sensations RackaRacka with more than 1.5 billion  views on YouTube . Named one of Variety’s 2016 FameChangers and ranked 5th on the Australian Financial Review’s Cultural Power List, the brothers are the creators of action comic horror online content, which has racked up more than 1.5 billion views and over 6.6 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Their numerous awards include Best Integrational Channel Streamy Award; Best Overall at the Online Video Awards; and AACTA Award for Best Web Show.” Well, there you are. I’m sure our mainstream film critics, whose average age is much closer to 70 than the age of the Philippou twins, likely knew nothing about any of that. So it’s a bit of a marketing triumph that the film is getting any attention at all. I suspect its pedigree with the AFF and Causeway has helped.

 

So is that going to get Talk to Me over the line and get the people now queuing for Barbie and Oppenheimer curious? Hard to say. The film-makers had the idea “about a teenage girl who gets hooked on possession by spirits which cause nightmares and violent self-destructive tendencies when delved into by kids too young to handle it as a new high.”It’s “about young people dealing with addiction and mental illness, the way that what begins as an escape from suppressed pain, can actually become a terrifying eruption of that pain.” (Anti-drug message?)

 

Is it frightening? Is it filled with dread about possible shocking physical violence? Not really…in fact its rated MA15+ and gore fans  may even find it a bit genteel, which may be why the film festival and the critics are happy enough to engage with it. It’s certainly nothing like I Spit on Your Grave or Last House on the Left. They were deeply shocking.