Amidst a horde of pink-garbed Barbie celebrants in a south Salt Lake Valley Megaplex, I attended a preview screening of the Australian Talk To Me. A24 can now add another notch to its horror cult classic belt.

Talk To Me (2023)
Writers: Danny Philippou, Bill Hinzman
Directors:  Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Notable Cast: Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen, Joe Bird, Otis Dhanji, Miranda Otto, Zoe Terakes, Chris Alosio, Marcus Johnson, Alexandria Steffensen
Plot: When a group of friends discover how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand, they become hooked on the new thrill, until one of them goes too far and opens the door to the spirit world forcing them to choose who to trust: the dead or the living. (source: imdb)

The Hand of Glory has a long history in European occult folklore. The detached left hand of a murderer, used as a grisly lamp with rendered fat from that same murderer, was believed to achieve many supernatural feats including paralysis and lockpicking.

This movie offers a slight twist on that theme. The enameled severed hand of a psychic medium allows the living person who grasps it, with proper and very simple ritual supplications, to communicate with disembodied spirits. With another supplication, the spirit will enter the person, to be banished only by the actions of the persons attending the ritual.

For maximum mayhem and horror, this hand falls in the hands of a pack of feckless bored teens in an Australian suburb. Mia (Wilde) lives with her best friend Jade and their little brother Riley, under their mother Sue’s care (LotR‘s Miranda Otto). When the pack of slightly sociopathic, awful so-called friends – they get their kicks setting up their friends for dangerous antics – introduce her to the possession qualities of the hand, Mia becomes hooked as she seeks to resolve the grief and trauma of her mother’s suicide and her estrangement from her father.

What could have been a light teen horror romp actually features excellent performances and subtle emotional depths. A24’s style and reputation for “elevated horror” (bleh) is not compromised. The horror is real and urgent as little brother Riley’s life becomes endangered by a malevolent spirit. The elegant, simple ending still haunts me.

An amazing journey through a claustrophobic afterlife, it left me – ME – with this vexing conundrum: where is the satanic panic? These kids NEED A HEALTHY DOSE OF SATANIC PANIC! The movie felt like it existed in a world where The Exorcist was never made and urban legends about ouija boards were never circulated. If us 80s kids fucked with a ouija board we had to steel ourselves with oodles of nerve, given what was in the air at the time. But this group of kids used the hand like they were huffing whip-its.

Don’t experiment with spirit possession when your friends-frenemies are in the throes of their shithead teenage years.

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