Sundance Review: Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou’s Supernatural Horror ‘Talk To Me’
deadline.comChildren shouldn’t play with dead things: not just the title of a low-budget American horror from 1972 but words to live by, especially in this unnerving and highly effective Midnight entry from Australia.
But though it employs some familiar tropes — high-schoolers dabble in the occult and soon begin to wish they hadn’t, Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou’s film Talk to Me does attempt to do something new with an old idea, for one thing making the crossing of infernal thresholds seem like an awful lot of fun.
From the start, the most striking thing is that there’s not much in the way of a preamble and very little lip service to genre traditions.
The Philippous are respectful enough of modern audiences to understand that everybody knows now where the moral line is, so instead of the traditional setup — historically, a creepy, drunken old man yelling, “Stay away from Camp Crystal Lake” — they start with a micro-movie, in which a teenager turns up to a drunken party to look for his brother.
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