"Talk To Me" is leaving audiences with lots of questions.
Are the kids possessed by spirits or demons?
What do those beings want?
And what's the deal with the kangaroo?
"Talk to me."
"Talk to Me" opens with Cole at a party searching for his brother Duckett — who's been acting
strangely.
Cole yells at the party-goers for filming Duckett's freakout, but Duckett ends that
defense by stabbing his brother, and then himself.
After this shocking intro, the movie shifts to Mia.
She and her friends play with a supposed psychic's embalmed hand that grants those who hold it
and say "talk to me" then "I let you in" a very special high via spirit possession.
However, the catch is that the possession has to be cut off by letting go of the hand
and blowing out the candle within 90 seconds.
Any longer, and things tend to get out of control.
Mia goes a bit over the time limit during her possession — which makes her see things
long after she's stopped holding the hand.
Unable to resist the euphoric high that the hand offers, Mia and her best friend Jade
host a get-together with the kids from school who own the hand.
Things get real when Mia allows Jade's little brother Riley to take his turn with the hand
— against the wishes of his sister.
It goes fine at first, but then Mia encourages him to stay possessed for longer than the
allotted time after she realizes he's seemingly inhabited by the spirit of her beloved mom.
This causes the possessed Riley to try to destroy himself — and leads an increasingly
possessed Mia on a path of destruction.
So what happened to Mia's mom?
We learn early on from Mia that she overdosed on sleeping pills and couldn't be saved in
time because she was in a locked room.
It's implied that it was suicide, but Mia isn't certain.
Nonetheless, Mia's grief isolates her from friends and family, who love and feel for
her, but have moved on with their lives.
Her dad and friends don't know how to handle her depression, and neither does Mia.
"It's my mom's remembrance day.
I just want to forget about it."
That is, until she gets her mitts on the hand.
As previously mentioned, she makes supposed contact with her mother during Riley's possession.
This causes her to become obsessed with the hand and use it to find out the truth about
what happened to her mom.
As Mia's addiction to the hand grows, so do the consequences of using it.
Mia sees more of her "mom," but leaves herself open to being possessed by all manner of demons.
Even though the hand helped Mia feel less alone at first, by the end of "Talk to Me"
it has taken over her life and endangered those of her friends and family.
Mia's shift from the hero of the movie to its fearsome killer is made possible because,
in her grief, Mia lets the wrong ones in.
Those demons take her — and almost get her for good — in the end.
Not a lot is known about the embalmed hand, but we do learn that if you die while possessed,
the demons will have you forever.
At the end of the movie, Riley seems right on track for life in eternal demon hell.
So does Mia.
The kids find Cole, who tells them the safest bet for Riley is to wait the demons out — but
Mia's getting other information.
Mia's "mom" tells her that her father is an impersonator, leading possessed Mia to accidentally
stab him.
Thinking she's killed her father and desperate to free Riley from his possession, Mia tricks
Jade into leaving her alone with Riley.
The false maternal spirit convinces her that if Riley dies, he will be at peace and she
can "take care of him."
It looks like Mia is going to kill Riley, until a spirit vision of the bloody kangaroo
from the beginning of the movie shows up in the hospital.
Jade discovers Mia's dad, then races to the hospital in time to see Mia pushes Riley's
wheelchair up to the highway.
Just when we think she's going to push Riley out into the oncoming traffic, Mia throws
herself onto the road instead.
At first, it looks like she survived, demon-free.
However, as she walks through the hospital and sees a now-healed Riley with his family,
and sees her father, also recovered, she realizes she's dead.
She heads toward a small light, where an outstretched hand awaits, belonging to one of many Greek
partiers.
The final moment shows Mia on the other side of the "talk to me" handshake — the spirit
side.
At face value, the end of "Talk to Me" means Mia shook the curse the same way Duckett did
in the opening of the movie — she ended the curse by ending herself.
But, just like with Duckett's self-destruction, the cursed buck doesn't truly stop there.
Even if Mia's sacrifice ultimately ended the immediate effects of the curse, the fact that
she has a waking experience of the spirit world as a ghost herself — along with the
fact that the hand ends up in Greece — means there's always going to be more to this story.
As long as the cursed embalmed hand still exists, it seems likely to keep being passed
to other groups of friends and partiers looking for a new high, a higher follower count, or
even a sweet bit of relief from grief.
"What did the hand feel like?"
"It felt amazing."
So, do spirits or demons haunt the hand?
Sometimes the possessions seem friendly, sometimes there's making out with dogs, and sometimes
there's a bloody red pit full of demons feasting on the flesh of the innocent Riley.
So which is it?
There are flickers of both spirits and demons in the world the kids access with the hand.
For a moment in each possession, there appears to be a real spirit present.
But then, the spirits can become demonic if someone remains possessed for too long.
"What happens after ninety seconds?"
"They'll want to stay."
For instance, when Riley is first possessed, Mia's mom's spirit seems genuine.
All she wants to do is ask her daughter's forgiveness and say she loves her.
But after Riley goes over time, any "spirit" that appears through him seems evil.
Throughout the movie, Mia flickers between seeing helpful spirits — such as the little
girl on Riley's bed — to demons like her "mom" and "dad".
There's also the aforementioned demon buffet dimension she witnesses when she tries to
free Riley from limbo in the hospital.
This lore isn't ever fully fleshed out in the movie, which doesn't matter when you watch
it — but the confusion helps muddy the waters for Mia as she desperately follows her grief
into hell.
It's a time-honored tradition in possession films for demons to mess with people either
because the humans messed with them first, or because demons want what demons want — which
is to feast on an endless buffet of human souls.
"Talk to Me" never dives too deeply into the lore of why demons do what they do, but it's
a little from column A and a little from column B when it comes to what they want from Mia.
But, as we mentioned earlier, if she stays too long or dies while possessed, the demons
get her forever.
For whatever reason.
Mia summons the spirits through the hand.
Then she breaks the rules and makes Riley stay too long under the "possessive" state.
So now the demons want their human bodies and eternal souls.
"What if we opened the door, but we didn't shut it?"
It's a real "you break it, you buy it" possession philosophy.
If Mia didn't get greedy, maybe she and Riley could have just sung more songs together in
the car.
Mia sees a dying kangaroo in the beginning that comes back to literally haunt her in
the end.
However, unlike her demonic mother figure, this animal's ghost isn't interested in possessing
Mia's mortal soul; instead, the kangaroo wants to save it.
In the beginning of the movie, Mia and Riley see a wounded kangaroo on the side of the
road.
Even though the animal is struggling and in pain, Mia is unable to "put it out of its
misery."
Maybe Mia sees some of her own struggle in the kangaroo, or perhaps she's just grossed
out by the idea of killing it herself to show some mercy.
Either way, she ultimately drives away and leaves the animal to struggle.
But in the ending of "Talk to Me," Mia sees the bloody kangaroo again — the spirit version
this time.
The sight of it, right before she would otherwise kill Riley, seems to strike a chord with her.
The bloody kangaroo is a reminder of her humanity, and it literally leads the way for Mia to
withdraw from the demons' clutches long enough to save Riley from herself — and possibly,
to save her own soul.
Those of us who spend a lot of time watching horror movies know that a great majority of
them don't particularly hit us with all the feels; more often than not, it's all about
thrills, scares, and gore.
While "Talk To Me" surely has its fair share of these things, it also reaches deeper and
presents us with an actual character that we can identify with and feel for.
Mia's grief is seen as a nuisance to her friends and especially her father, who lies about
her mom's death in a misguided attempt to protect her.
She's awkward with Jade's family, uncomfortable at home, and feels desperately alone, except
for the big sister dynamic she has with Riley.
He's a sweet kid stuck between being a child and a teenager, and Mia is the only person
in his life who sees him on his own terms.
So it makes the ending all the more poignant, heart-racing, and grim that Mia can save — or
destroy — both of their lives with her choices.
But did Mia deserve even more pain than she was dealing with in the first place?
The end of "Talk to Me" gives Mia one hero moment, but still leaves her lost in the dark.
She could have grown through her grief with Riley, but instead, she's trapped in limbo
— making the occasional escape only for haunted party tricks.
Knowing that the hand goes on to claim more victims like Mia and Duckett is a twist of
the knife — and a real emotional knuckle sandwich.
Viewers are left with many questions at the end of the movie.
How much time has passed between Mia's death and the first time she's summoned by the Greek
partiers?
Is Mia going to be able to communicate with anyone in any meaningful way ever again?
Will Mia be a destructive force if she possesses a human body, or will she walk the metaphorical
path of the helpful, bloody kangaroo for someone else down the line?
The directors of "Talk to Me," twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, want to leave
the ending up to the audience to determine.
Danny told Dexerto :
"We just want for people to have their own interpretations and be able to have that conversation.
But all the clues are there.
Everything's planted, but we really don't want to spell things — spell anything — out."
While the movie doesn't hand its audiences any clear-cut message, the directors acknowledge
that the film's themes extend from their own personal experiences.
Michael told Dazed:
"Severe depression runs in our family.
Our grandmother took her own life, and our mum struggles with it.
There's that idea of inheriting it.
Are we going to be depressed in that way as well?"
Danny agreed, saying:
"I was tapping into things that scared me personally ... I can't really pinpoint what
the film is about, because it's expressing so many different things."
"Talk to Me" stands on its own as a self-contained horror movie, but could its world get revisited?
We still have a lot of questions.
Cole seemed to know more about the possession even after his brother Duckett died; did he
do his research after the loss?
Is Riley doing research on Mia's loss?
Is anyone going to try and summon her from the dead?
Danny told RogerEbert.com:
"Even when we were writing the first film, we were writing scenes for a sequel."
Michael agreed, saying:
"We have barely scratched the surface of that world, and so the idea of doing 'Talk 2 Me'
would be very exciting."
Elaborating on the possibility of extending the story in the future, Danny told Dexerto:
"We have an entire Mythology Bible that we don't really even touch on in the film that
explains everything.
From like where the hand came from, and there's like little clues hidden on the hand and little
seeds that we planted."
In the same interview, Michael joked:
"We're looking forward to 'Talk To Me 8: Talk To Me in Space.'"
While it might be a minute before we get to "The Conjuring" levels of the "Talk to Me"
franchise, count us in for "Talk 2 Me: Talk 2 the Hand."