Review: You have to hand it to ‘Talk to Me,’ a gripping thriller about love and loss

If Regan MacNeil were to go skittering backward down the stairs today, would her onlookers scream in terror or whip out their phones — or both? The question comes to mind more than once during “Talk to Me,” a viscerally effective supernatural freakout in which demonic possession isn’t just an abomination but an addiction, a recreational pastime and sometimes even a viral event.

In the movie’s most pleasurably disturbing sequence, several thrill-seeking teenagers take turns shaking hands with the devil, conjuring malevolent spirits for a brief spell and videoing the results for kicks, laughs and internet posterity. Better judgment be damned; the power of likes compels them.

The idea that kids these days might rent out their bodies and risk their souls for 90 seconds at a time is so darkly funny and spookily resonant, it’s a bit of a letdown that this sharp, bristling Australian thriller doesn’t take it much further. What the concept does establish from the outset — starting with a squirmy house-party prologue, featuring much stabbing of flesh and waving of phones — is a keen sense of the dark side of youthful anomie, and the ways even an ostensibly good time can go lethally awry. Danny and Michael Philippou, twin brothers making a slick and assured feature directing debut, know that a casual hangout isn’t always just a casual hangout, especially when there are lingering rivalries and unhealed traumas festering just beneath the surface.

Purely in terms of latent emotional volatility, the most troubled and troubling character in “Talk to Me” is its teenage protagonist, Mia (the excellent newcomer Sophie Wilde), who’s hiding more than her share of scars beneath her warm smile and gregarious demeanor. Since her mother’s untimely death not too long ago, Mia spends less time at home and more time with her best friend, Jade (Alexandra Jensen), and Jade’s younger brother, Riley (Joe Bird, in a superb and surprising performance). It’s both telling and touching that one of the first times we see Mia, she’s giving Riley a ride home, with both of them belting along to Sia‘s “Chandelier” on the radio. The two are practically surrogate siblings; unlike Jade, with whom Riley bickers constantly, Mia is the cool big sister he wishes he had.

But then the car stops, its headlights revealing a mortally wounded kangaroo — a regionally specific piece of roadkill, yes, but otherwise an all-too-familiar harbinger of horror-movie disaster. Before long, Jade, Riley and Mia find themselves at a party, where they’re sucked into a game centered on a creepily disembodied hand, now embalmed and encased in ceramic, that’s rumored to have once belonged to a medium with the power to conjure the dead. The hand’s rowdy present owners (Zoe Terakes and Chris Alosio) lay out the rules: With a few magic words (“Talk to me,” “I let you in”) and a firm, willing handshake, each player can invite a spirit into their body, with deliciously freaky results. But the invitation must be revoked in 90 seconds or less, lest the possession risk becoming permanent.

Sophie Wilde in the movie “Talk to Me.”

(Sundance Institute)

It’s a nifty, hooky premise, one that soon gives rise to that inspired recreational montage. The grotesque prosthetic effects and nerve-shredding sound design are first rate; they’re also a calculatedly showy distraction. Beneath all the creepy pupil dilations and ghoulish makeup, the Philippou brothers, working from a script by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, maintain a strong grip on the group’s emotional dynamics, layering on the minor misunderstandings and petty jealousies while maneuvering their characters into position. By the time Mia comes face to face with what may be the spirit of her late mom, what began as a game has tilted into a full-blown hallucinatory nightmare.

The specifics, violent and terrifying, are best left for you to discover. Suffice to say that Mia is hurled into a maelstrom of guilt, terror and desperation that finds her suddenly estranged from a family — Jade’s — that had come to feel like her own. To some extent, “Talk to Me” is very much about this blurring of emotional and relational boundaries. With parents and children so often at odds, whether it’s Jade arguing with her protective single mother (a fine Miranda Otto) or Mia walling herself off from her grieving dad (Marcus Johnson), real family is often where you find it. The intimacy of friendship becomes its own benign form of possession, a willing exchange of souls.

These are fascinating, even moving ideas, even if the Philippou brothers don’t always have them entirely under control. In its harrowing closing stretch, the narrative begins to unravel in ways both effective and not; as Mia struggles to appease or defeat the demonic forces in her midst, it’s not always clear if the movie is dramatizing or succumbing to her break with reality.

But even when “Talk to Me” flirts with incoherence, Wilde pulls it back from the brink. More than just a great scream queen, she makes vivid sense of Mia’s ravaged emotions, revealing her to be a captive less to the spirit realm than to her own inconsolable grief. She’s the movie’s revelation, hands down.