WICKED GAY
WICKED GAY
Wicked Gay Pop Whatever #5: Talk To Me
Send J. Harvey a text! (Try to be nice, but I get it, everyone's a little cranky sometimes...)
I saw this A24 horror flick the other night, and one scene scared the stuffing out of me. Naturally, I had to discuss it and spoil everything for you. *shrug*
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That trailer with the really gnarly sound design is for a 2022 A24 horror film from Australia called Talk to Me. I saw it recently, and it’s the kind of horror flick that delighted me. It delighted me so much and scared the bejeezus out of me with one scene that I yelled out loud and almost flew off the couch to call the police. My husband, who was trying to sleep down the hall, got up to make sure we weren’t being home-invaded.
You’re listening to Wicked Gay, which is usually a true crime podcast about gay people doing awful things. But tonight, it’s one of those episodes where J. Harvey raves about a movie he enjoyed and spoils the whole thing for you. You’re welcome!
The movie is about a group of teens who discover they can summon spirits using a mysterious embalmed hand. Instead of going to church, the press, or burying the hand, they decide to turn it into a party game. Forget about seeing who can drink the most Borgs; let’s get possessed by Satan!
I don’t think I have to tell you, this all goes horribly wrong, and that’s when the movie gets really good. So I thought I’d talk about it this evening as one of those Pop Whatevers I throw up occasionally.
Right now, I’m working on an episode of Wicked Gay proper, but I’m trying to make it a video episode, so I’m writing it to ensure it makes sense and sounds good. I’m also figuring out how to get all the equipment to work, and it seems like a woman of my advanced age needs as many ring lights as possible to avoid looking ghastly. I’ve done some TikToks in the past, but this is YouTube; it’s got to look decent, so I’m learning this stuff.
With the rate I’m going, I figure it going up around Christmas. Merry Me!
I thought I’d share a good movie with you and spoil the whole thing. Sometimes, you don’t want to bother seeing it, but you still want to know what happens in case it comes up in conversation. It’s kind of like when I drove for Uber; I would take a moment to learn what sports teams had played and won the night before so I could pretend to care about Boston sports with my passengers. Some passengers, especially guys, would get really weirded out if I said, "Yeah, I’m not really into sports," and it would get quiet and awkward as if I just told them I had recently come out of a psychiatric institution. So, I usually knew who to engage with and how. I’ll do that for you.
It's like when you’re too lazy to watch White Lotus, but you end up watching a bunch of reels of Parker Posey’s accent so you’re still part of the zeitgeist. Because I’m a giver.
This is Wicked Gay Pop Whatever #5: Talk to Me
Demon possession movies all have to crib from the original - Friedkin’s The Exorcist, which is the gold standard. Nothing has been as audacious since; you can’t top it. So, there aren’t a lot of surprises left in the demonic possession genre. To even rate, your movie has to be inventive, as startling as possible, and feature characters you feel bad for when Satan starts making them do naughty and antisocial things. Because no one really wanted to see poor little Regan MacNeil doing that with a representation of Jesus, not to mention what she did to her mom when her mom tried to stop her. No one ever talks about that part because it was so messed up that we all just wiped it off our frontal lobes. Anyway, Talk to Me definitely ranks among possession movies.
Talk to Me is directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, with Danny co-writing it alongside Bill Hinzman. I didn’t know anything about the Philippous, but apparently, in addition to making horror movies, they’re YouTubers and stunt performers. It resembles the Paul family, but with talent and way less drama.
It’s got a solid 95% on ROtten Tomatoes, and grossed approximately $92 million worldwide on a budget of around $4.5 million, making it a massive success for indie horror and for production company A24. I’m sure they’ll be a Talk to Me 2: Yell at Me or something.
The movie’s protagonist is a teenage girl named Mia, played by Sophie Wild. Mia just lost her moms two years ago, so she somewhat half-lives with her best girlfriend, who has a regular name but looks just like Lorde, so I’m calling her Lorde for the rest of the episode. You’ll get used to it. Mia spends a lot of time at Lorde’s because she and her dad are on the outs. So much so that he only appears as a blur since she’s pretty much icing him out, and we learn later that it’s because he has some sort of secret related to his wife’s death. Mia spends a lot of time watching a TikTok she and her mom made together before she died, where they were talking and laughing. And it seems very far away.
Oh, Lorde also had a mom played by Miranda Otto. You might remember her from Lord of the Rings; she was Éowyn, who briefly fought against Sauron while disguised as a guy, and she had a line like, "I am no man, sirrah, for I am a shieldmaiden" or something like that. Basically, Peter Jackson decided that the women in Middle-earth needed some face time with the audience because breathy Liv Tyler and her pointy ears weren’t enough. Tolkien is not known for his intricately complex female characters; I mean, Shelob the spider is really the only character in the story that gets to do anything. Lorde also had a little brother named Rikey, who’s about 12 and very impressionable because he’s a sweet kid, and his best friend is this bully jerk he wants to impress since he’s 12. Oh, and Lorde has this boyfriend named Daniel, who is adorable. I’m not being a creep, but if I were a teenage girl or boy, I’d think Daniel, with his curly hair, was dreamy.
These kids also hang out with other kids, mostly a duo named Hayl and Josss. I want to stop here and note that the film’s directors seemingly get teens right. They don’t sound too old for their age; these kids aren't Gossip Girl or Euphoria types. They sound like suburban kids with typical suburban problems whose faces are glued to their phones. They ring true, but what do I know—I’m 50. I also thought it was cool that one of them is trans, specifically transmasculine. Their name is Hayley, and it’s not even remarked upon. Hayley is popular and kind of an asshole, which makes the nonchalance over having a trans teen in the mix even better. They’re not dealing with a fraught coming out story; they’re throwing the parties everyone wants to go to and getting possessed by demons at.
Alright, so we’re in some town in Australia at night, and there’s this guy named Cole showing up at a teenage house party looking for his brother. He doesn’t seem too thrilled, and he’s asking people where Duckett, his brother, is. That’s a name. He finally finds him in a bedroom, shirtless, covered in scratches and cuts, staring at the wall in a creepy manner. The party-goers are chuckling about this and getting it on their phones. They stop laughing when Cole leads a dazed and zombie-like Duckett out of the bedroom and into the kitchen in hopes of leaving. Suddenly, Duckett grabs a knife and plunges it into his brother. Yikes. The partygoers stop filming and start screaming and running; Cole falls out of frame, maybe dead, and in a long shot, Duckett wanders onto the back patio and shockingly stabs himself in the eye, and he’s dead. End prologue. That was one gnarly house party.
Ok, the movie proper we meed high-schooler Mia, and her bestie Lorde and Lorde’s Lorde’s younger brother Riley who Mia has a special connection with, and is sort of his other big sister she even picks him up from wherever he’s doing mischief with his portly little friend who bullies him, and they sing SIA together in the car. It’s sweet. They make you care about Riley so they mean people considering what happens to this little moppet.
So there’s a party, and Mia is like, "Oh, I don’t want to go. People don’t like me," and Lorde is like, "Nonsense, come on, let’s go to the party." The second they arrive, Hayley rolls up to Lorde and is like, "Why did you bring her? I don’t like her." Heh. You know how you manifest the negative stuff you’re thinking? It’s exactly that. So party things happen, and Riley gets the girls to take him to the party too, and it’s teens partying. When we reach the peak of the evening, Hayley and their best friend Joss—who, by the way, seems like this straight, football jock type—and I thought it was cool that his bestie is a trans person. Anyway, these two are all about messing with people for good social media content.
They produce an embalmed hand with strange writing all over it. This is the magic hand that allows demons to enter Australia’s teen scene, like on TikTok and such. Everyone’s like, "Whooo, party! The demon hand’s here!" Mia wants people to like her, and she’s been fascinated by the footage she’s seen online of teens with jet-black eyes, contorting into unnatural positions while their friends love it.
So everyone;s like whoo Mia, whom we normally dont care for because she’s always mopey cuz her moms dead, you know how kids are, well Mia is suddenly cool and interesting because she’s going to fuck with dead people. So Mia gets strapped into the chair. Hayley warns that people are only allowed to stay using the hand for 90 seconds. I’m not sure who established this rule, but if a demon stays with you for more than one minute thirty seconds (which is exactly the amount of time necessary to heat up Uncle Ben’s Instant Rice in the microwave), if you stay anylonger than that, to quote Hayley, they wont leave of they said, theyll want to stay. Brrrr…
So Mia grasps the embaled hand in a handshake and follows the instructions - she asks whoever to talk to me, and then she gasps and rears back because there’s this really dead looking rotting corpse apparition leering at her that only she can see. And she’s like WTF, and everyone/s laughing because they’ve been through this before and look at this newbie. Now, the second part of the ritual is to verbally let whatever dead thing is hanging about into you but saying come in me, or something less lacivious than that came out. Which Mia does and whammo, her eyes are jet black, her bones and joints are crunchy sounding, and she’s got some rosacea going on.
Everyone is in love with this except Lorde, who urged Mia not to do it, does not believe in this phenomenon, and is now sitting there watching her friend, wondering, “Is this bitch faking?” Mia does some fun stuff, like speaking in different voices, and she seems all possessed. Whatever’s inside her notices little Riley, who sort of blackmailed Lorde to let him come. Mia’s visitor clearly has designs on the youngest and most vulnerable of these clean teens. They finally realize it’s been 90 seconds and they yank her out, but it’s a little past that. Oh no. Anyway, Mia had the time of her life, and suddenly everyone loves brave Mia and thinks she’s a badass, so her social problems are solved.
There are some indications that even though she only took the allowed 90 seconds, something might have followed Mia back into her life. Figures on the periphery, you know. The night she let a demon into her, she stayed over at Lorde’s, and Riley came to sleep with her and asked her what it was like, and she basically loved it. This conversation not only shows that Mia is eager to go again, but also that Riley now wants to emulate those he looks up to and wants to let them in himself.
So at school the next week, Mia and Lorde approach Hayley who is like transmasc and wearing baggy jeans and smoking a cigarette and basiclly looking formidable as fuck while sitting on the trunk of their car, and Mia has convinced Lorde to let them give each other mystical handjobs at Lorde’s mom’s house cuz mom will be out at work.
So, Party #2 has just Mia, Lorde, Riley, Riley’s nasty little friend, cute boyfriend Daniel, and Hayley and Joss. It's a small gathering this time. Hayley and Joss tell them that the hand might have belonged to a psychic or a Satanist, hence the freaky demon stuff.
Daniel goes first this time, which is weird because he’s previously been described as religious and kind of straight edge. Then again, being possessed by a demon could mean some of that shit in the bible about legion we are many could be true. He goes for it, and it’s slash comic disturbing cuz the demon he lets in is horny. And tried to fuck the living room floor. And when that doesn’t yield any satisfaction, he starts making out with the dog. I know, like…know. Bestility is one kink, and I will judge - just no.
So when Daniel comes to, everyone there (Hayley and the beefy jerk Joss, to be specific) has gleefully and without hesitation recorded Daniel’s entire trip, which culminates in his tongue-lashing of Lorde’s dog.
As anyone would when faced with 4K footage of themselves getting it on with a canine, Daniel freaks out and demands everyone erase the recording. There’s not a lot of compliance there. So he stormed out. The party continues, and the able-bodied- I believe Mia, Hayley, and Joss all take turns getting possessed. They all party, get drunk and high, and enjoy the music, letting Satan into their orifices to work through them. All sorts of weird shit goes down. It’s a big montage, and at one point, we see/hear a possessed Mia signing a creepy little tune in French. It must have been Edith Piaf who was possessing her.
So, Lorde leaves the room at some point, probably to comfort and console her boyfriend, who made out with the dog. And Riley begs Mia to let him play Talk to Me. And she’s like fuck no you’re 12 have you not seen The Exorcist. Captain Howdy isn’t the one to play with. But he begs and begs, and Hayey and Joss are excited ot see the results of a vastly underage child being possessed, and Mia wants to be the cool mom while Lorde is out of the picture and says Yeah, he can do it. Who-hoo!
Lil’ Riley is strapped in, the candle is lit. With a hand grasped, he says, "Talk to me." He reels back in horror as he sees the apparition of a rotting corpse, one that only he can perceive. Peer pressure is a real bitch, and he gives in to the urging of others to let this demon enter his body. At first it’s all laughs, but then it’s a little less funny when Mia’s dead mom, or a demonic presence posing as Mia’s mom, starts talking to her through a 12-year-old boy.
So, Mia is really freaked out by this. Then it gets worse. Really bad. This is the part of the movie where I literally yelled out loud, "WHOA!" and leaned back on my couch. We have a really big, scary TV, so it felt like sitting up close in an IMAX theater. The sound design is incredible because it exceeds the 90-second mark. It’s kind of Mia’s fault because they didn’t pull him out in time since she wanted to hear what her mom had to say.
So Riley begins to slam his head into the table in front of him, over and over an over, and everyone is screaming trying to get him to stop, and then he does, long enough to try to…oh uh warning for gruesome here, bite himself repeatedly and he tries to take his eyeball out with his fingers, meanwhile he’s still shaking the enbalmed hand of room, and they’re all trying to yank it away from him and there’s blood everywhere. Luckily, he doesn't get the eyeball all the way out. Still, him and the chair he’s strapped are suddenly SHOVED across the room over to the opposite wall with such force that the window he’s slammed into shatters, and Demon Riley can take a licking and keep on ticking because he takes the opportunity to start bashing his head AGAIN and REPEATEDLY off a desk beside him. It’s a brutal, shocking, disturbing scene, and it’s when I was like, ok, this movie is officially rad cuz it freaked me out.
The filmmakers, these brothers, are clever and always endanger the young and innocent. It’s kind of like in the first four seasons of Buffy when they threatened to hurt Willow. That is until she absorbed all the bad magic in the world, beat the crap out of Buffy, and tried to bury the world. Before that, she was the cute damsel in distress more than once. Who cared if Xander got hurt? He was a jerk, a stand-in for Joss Whedon, and his whining was super friend-zone repellent.
Anyway, ambulance comes, cops come, poor Lil’ Riley is severely injured with head trauma, and who knows if he’ll get better. Hayley and Joss are like brotha, we’re fucked cuz’ we’re the hand pimps, let’s dip out, which they do.
Riley is now in a coma, and his face looks like silly putty. Mom Miranda Otto shows up, and she’s like Mia, what drug did you let my babyangel take and mia’s like uh i would never hurt Riley it wasnt a drug, and Miranda Otto is like ok GTFO Mia, and Lorde is done with her, too, because she knows Mia let Riley do the damn thing.
So Riley offers to drive Mia home, and we find out later she’s stolen the hand and is keeping it in her backpack. Where the hand goes… and remember, Mia went more than 90 seconds with a demon inside her. Okay, and there’s some residual attraction between these two because they dated in second grade. Keep in mind that they were heavily flirting at both parties; Mia was putting her head on Daniel’s shoulder, saying, "Oh Danny, you’re so funny! Tee hee!" and Lorde noticed this. Anyway, Daniel ends up staying over at Mia’s, totally innocent since she’s in a tough spot and having some visions. At one point, she does try to make a move on him, but he politely declines, and they go to bed like foot-to-head, just like you did with your brothers when relatives stayed over at Christmas. Innocent.
Except Mia wakes up in the middle of the night and sees Daniel’s sweet hairy calf beside her, and she tries to cuddle up beside it. Kind of like when I shared a cot with a boy I liked during a sleepover in early high school. He was sleeping on his side and kinda in a fetal position and I tried to sleep so that I was in shrimp formation so our butts were touching, when our butts did touch he stirred a ittle bit so I straightened up and realized it was probably wrong. Mia is almost nuzzling Daniel’s leg when she notices a corpulent ghost in the corner of her bedroom. Yeesh. And then the corpulent ghost lady starts crawling toward the bed, and Mia is frozen in fear. And the corpulent ghost lady turns out to have a lot in common with Quentin Tarantino as she hops on the bed and starts sucking on the still sleeping Daniels foot. This move is beyond. And you’re waiting for this babe to bite down but she doesn’t she wants to suck toes, and it’s almost worst? I could probably deal with gouts of blood, but watching a teenage boy get his tootsies molested by a ghost Karen is somehow more disturbing.
Daniel finally wakes up and discovers his foot is in Mia’s mouth. Yes, there was no corpulent ghost lady; it was a re-possessed Mia giving oral to Daniel’s foot. You can imagine Daniel’s reaction. You can’t? Well, he leaves, and Mia’s all freaked. A little time passes, and Riley gets showered by a nurse who makes the mistake of leaving the shower room. Lorde comes in to find Riley bashing his head against the wall again. This demon wants Riley dead. And it’s another brutal scene. Seriously, I think I'd rather watch someone get stabbed than get their melon bounced off a hard surface.
Oh, and Mia uses the hand on her own, and her mom shows up to her—her dead mom’s rotting ghost. She reveals that Mia’s death was just an accident and that she would never have left her if she had the choice. She also tells Mia that Riley is doomed because his soul has been whisked away to hell, where he is being tortured. Mia leaves the connection with her mom open, and her mom keeps haunting her. She takes the hand to the hospital room and has it shake with Riley again, and she has a horrifying image of Riley being tortured by demons in hell.
At some point, the breakfast club tracks down Cole from the beginning of the movie, who exclaims, "Fuck you, Hayley and Joss, for killing my brother with your party hand," and lets Mia know that a living body will eventually expel invading spirits. I'm not sure that’s helpful, and Mia doesn't either, but Hayley and Joss peace out, so it’s down to Mia, Lorde, and Daniel to save Riley.
Mia goes home to her father, finally admitting to her that her mother killed herself in the bathroom with pills but had second thoughts and tried to claw through the bathroom door for help, so she had an awful, reluctant suicide death. He also shows Mia the suicide note he had hidden previously, and it reveals how Rhea was severely depressed and how sorry she is for leaving them like that.
This could have been a heartwarming moment if Mom Ghost hadn't appeared to a very upset Mia, who had just sought refuge from all the trauma in her bedroom. Mom Ghost hints that it wasn't a suicide and that Max, the dad, actually murdered her and wants to hurt Mia now. Meanwhile, the dad is banging on the bedroom door trying to get to her, and in the chaos, Mia ends up stabbing her dad in the throat, thinking he was trying to kill her, which he wasn't. So, Dad seems dead, and Mia is now a murderer.
Then Ghost Mom, a total mean girl, tells Mia that Riley has to die to be free. And Mia, completely bamboozled by ghosts now, heads out to kill her little brother. She calls Lorde to her house and then leaves. Lorde shows up and finds Max, who is somehow still alive despite the screwdriver his daughter drove into his neck.
Lorde rushes back to the hospital and arrives just in time to see Mia using a wheelchair to take her comatose brother, pushing him up a nearby embankment to roll him into the traffic below. There are so many other less messy ways she could have done this, saving herself from getting all sweaty pushing a wheelchair up a hill. But, shrug emoji.
A crazed, haunted Mia is about to throw Riley into traffic because her mom is telling her to, while Lorde shows up, screaming for her to stop. Then we get the perspective of a couple in a car driving under the overpass where Mia and poor Riley are perched. Suddenly, something THWACKS into the car's roof, causing them to spin out, and you're left wondering if that noise was loud enough to have been a wheelchair. Then you find out it wasn’t.
Mia put the brakes on the wheelchair and dove headfirst herself. Now she’s lying all twisted in the middle of the highway. We see Lorde holding comatose Riley above her. Mia jumped so she wouldn’t have to kill Riley.
Mia’s not dead, though. She gets up. She’s all broken and road-burned and bloody but still moving and breathing. Next, we see her in the hospital. Riley was on the floor, slowly trudging through the ward, and the lights kept going on and off. She sees her Dad getting into an elevator and leaving, but he ignores her when she calls to him. Then she sees a fully recovered Riley, Lorde, and Mom Miranda Otto happy and leaving the hospital, but they ignore her too, and she notices she passes a mirror and has no reflection. and things get pitch dark, and she’s no longer in the hospital. She’s in a dark liminal space and sees a light in the distance. And it's a candle, and there’s a ghostly hand outstretched looking to hold hers.
And now she’s at another house party. And it’s all guys. And like older guys, and a bearded Greek dude is staring at us (the Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou brothers are of Greek descent, by the way). And Aristole here is mesmerized by what he’s seeing, and Mia is like what the hell, and he’s holding his hand out to her. He says he’ll let her in. And BAM!
Yep, Mia is now one of the spirits doomed to be attached to the hand and haunt the reckless living who crave spectacle. But hey, maybe she can reconnect with her mom somewhere in there. It’s not all bad. She saved the kid.
And that’s "Talk to Me." I loved the ending and the movie. It was original enough to keep me entertained, and Sophie Wild was fantastic as the troubled Mia. The fact that they went there and depicted violence against a kid was shocking and unexpected. It’s a must-watch if you enjoy horror.
And I'm excited to share that brothers Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou have already completed their next film. It’s titled "Bring Her Back" and features British actress Sally Hawkins, the actress who fell in love with the aquabeast in "The Shape of Water." It’s going to be good. Know how I know? Here’s the logline from IMDB:
A brother and sister discover a horrifying ritual at the isolated home of their new foster mother. Rated R for strong disturbing bloody violent content, some grisly images, graphic nudity, underage drinking, and language.
Oh, I’m in. That comes out on May 30.
Thank you for joining me this evening. The good and proper Wicked Gay will hopefully resune soon and also on YouTube, no less. Wish me luck, cuz bitch I needit Nite!
