There’s a new horror mega-success on the loose, Talk to Me, the new A24 film that’s racking up ultra-high critic and audience scores, and multiplying its tiny budget already at the box office.
Talk To Me is the story of a group of teens playing a party game where you grab a mummified hand, tell it to talk to you, and then see visions of decaying dead souls you can actually ask to possess you. Temporarily, if you abide by a 90 second timer. Go over that and things get…bad.
It’s a fantastically made film, dealing with both grief and loss while seeming to be a metaphor for teenage drug use and addiction and the dangers therein. There are a few jumpscares, but it’s mostly just good, unsettling horror, dipping into Hereditary territory at times, particularly when one possession goes wrong with a very young teen that will be hard to erase from your mind.
However, as good as the film is, I genuinely hated its ending, which seems to break the logical rules of its universe and jams its way into a finale that doesn’t make sense. Spoilers follow.
The established rules of the universe are that you inhale a soul, you spit it out. If you don’t release it, it will stay inside you, which is what happens to the possessed teen Riley. The dead soul, housed in the boy, keeps trying to kill him, because if he dies with a soul inside him, they keep his soul forever.
The film keeps changing the rules around its lead, Mia. The idea is that you seen dead people, and at one point, her mother appears to Riley and speaks through him. Then, Mia keeps seeing her dead mother, only it seems very, very clear that she’s some twisted, corrupted version of her, or she’s just a straight up demon. Then there’s a bizarre, rule-breaking moment where a zombie version of Mia’s dad, who is very much not dead at this point, appears and starts throwing her around the room.
Eventually, Mia comes to a conclusion that killing Riley will end his torment at the hands of the demon/dead soul. She’s egged onto this conclusion by her demonic mother, except clearly the logic of this makes no sense because it would be literally be giving the Riley demon what it wants, and Riley’s soul would almost certainly be tortured forever in the afterlife, even if his body was dead.
Ultimately, Mia makes a different decision. Instead of killing Riley’s body, she ends up killing…herself, by throwing herself into traffic. For reasons that do not make any sense within this supernatural universe’s rules, this somehow cures Riley of his demon and he’s able to recover, go home and keep living his life.
What happened to the demon? Why did Mia killing herself save him? None of this is explained despite the first half of this movie setting up very specific rules about how all this works. I suppose the second half could be what happens when you don’t fully understand those rules, but when the audience doesn’t either, it doesn’t really work as a plot device, and everyone just ends up confused. I could understand if Mia performaned some sort of demon-extraction on Riley to transfer it to her, then she kills herself, but that…doesn’t happen? It makes no sense.
It feels like the movie just wanted to make sure Mia killed herself so they could do the last scene, where Mia wanders in limbo before she heads toward the light and grabs the hand of someone new playing the game, bringing things full circle. Except then this indicates that these really are dead souls and not just demons playing possum, further confusing the logic here.
Again, the entire film is really well executed and compelling, up until the last ten minutes or so. There had to be a better way to end this, and I cannot find any sort of explanation that makes sense for what happens. And “it’s not supposed to make sense” is not a satisfying answer.
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