Light the candle. Grab the cold, white hand.
Talk to me, you’re supposed to say. And then …
You can come in.
Such invitations are dangerous things. Vampires, it is said, require an invitation before they can enter a house—but once they’re in, they’re rarely considerate guests. Dr. Faust invited the devil himself. And in the legend’s earliest versions, the devil returns the favor—pulling Faust down for an eternal, infernal stay with him.
The dead long for the invitation. But more than that, they long to stay. To breathe. To feel. If given a chance, they’re not going to be satisfied with a 90-second possession.
But these teens are careful. They tie themselves in. They time their time. And no matter how hard the dead might strive to make the living hold that disembodied hand—hold it so tight, so hard, that the hands of the living might turn white—the grip is always broken. The candle is always snuffed. And the dead are left on the other side. Again.
But everyone has their weaknesses.
Mia has held the hand more than most. She’s let many a dead soul share space with her own.
But then, when Riley, her best friend’s 14-year-old little brother, begs to hold the hand, he’s visited by someone he seems to know. And someone whom Mia knows painfully well.
Riley turns to Mia, tears of the dead welling in his living eyes. “Mi?” He says, using a pet name that only Mia and her mother—three years gone—ever used.
They agreed that they should keep Riley’s possession to just 50 seconds; no one so young has ever held the hand. It seemed safer that way. But Mia, hearing her mother, can’t bear to let her go just yet. Just a little longer, she begs. And a little longer.
Sixty. Eighty. Ninety. The seconds tick by. The door stays open.
And those on the other side plan to keep it that way.
Whatever its other faults, Talk to Me makes it absolutely, positively clear that one should never use the occult as a party trick.
Where did the hand come from? Its origin seems largely conjecture. The hand’s keeper (can it really have an owner?) heard that it once was that of a powerful psychic or medium. Another heard that it was once the hand of a Satanist. Regardless, beneath whatever plaster or ceramic covers it, most believe there’s real bone and sinew.
That bone and sinew connects to the realm of the dead. Someone mentions that it’s said to be limbo, though the glimpses we see of that spiritual realm seem much worse. Someone’s “soul” is trapped there after playing with the hand, and a glimpse of him shows that he’s being pulled and smothered by the animated “dead” beings around him.
The souls that possess the living here seem, by and large, creatures now consumed with their own passions (more on that below). These beings do not seem like traditional denizens of limbo (where, in Catholic tradition, unbaptized infants and those who were good people but who died before the coming of Christ temporarily resided), but rather entities who have some very serious issues. And they’re willing to do or say anything either to stay in the land of the living or to bring the living down to them.
The hand has also become the stuff of local internet legend. Videos are shared and posted; teens watch rabidly, wondering whether the vids are real or faked. Most of the people we see in the videos seem stoned or catatonic; sometimes their eyes take on a curious, almond-like tone.
Daniel, Mia’s ex-boyfriend (and the current beau of Mia’s friend, Jade), is described as being very Christian. Jade tells her mother that he’d never do anything untoward because of his faith. And that leads her mother to say …
“He still has a [penis], Jade.”
Daniel has been a gentleman with Jade. They’ve never even so much as kissed. (And Mia also recalls that when they went together, they didn’t do much more than hold hands.)
But when Daniel has his own encounter with the hand, the spirit possessing him suggests that Daniel was simply not attracted to Jade—using a variety of crude terms to convey just how much he allegedly loathes her touch. He instead ogles Mia and seems to masturbate under the spirit’s influence: The chair he’s strapped into falls over and he essentially French kisses Jade’s bulldog as he apparently works himself to near orgasm (though nothing critical is scene).
Other spirits are equally aroused. One dead thing apparently manipulates its host to suck on someone’s foot. Another possessed person leers at 14-year-old Riley, telling him how much he’d be enjoyed in whatever dead realm the possessor inhabits. (Later, a dead hand seems to stroke his cheek.)
We hear a lot of graphic conversation about sexual activities and body parts (though it seems that the teens we meet are a bit more innocent than they are in many movies). We see a teen guy who is shirtless; other teens at a pool party wear somewhat revealing swimwear. Mia and Daniel share a bed, though neither intend to do anything sexual. A frightened Riley also shares a bed with Mia in a completely platonic fashion.
The movie opens with us meeting, apparently, the last person who had played with the hand a little too much. He walks around in a stupor before stabbing someone in the chest. Then he takes the knife and stabs himself in the head. (We later learn, unsurprisingly, that he died.)
Another person under the influence of the hand starts pounding his head against a table and tries to yank out his own eye. This self-harm nearly kills him; later, in the hospital (and still apparently possessed), he thwacks his head against a tile wall—shattering the tile and laughing maniacally before he begins to lap up his own blood.
It might not be the first or last time that happened. The results of his self-harm have left his face and much of his body a mess: His face is a mass of injury, and when the camera glides over his forearm, we see deep bite marks—again, likely self-inflicted—covering that appendage.
The dead creatures here can also be deeply disturbing. Most seem as if they’ve been underwater for some time, with many looking bloated or decayed.
Mia and Riley come across an injured kangaroo in the road, groaning and bleeding and in a great deal of pain. Riley suggests they put it out of its misery. Mia tries, planning to run the creature over. But at the last minute she stops and drives around, hoping that another car will do the deed. As the hand pulls Mia deeper into itself, Mia begins having visions of injured, bleeding kangaroos in unexpected places.
We hear a lot about Mia’s mother, who died after taking too many sleeping pills. Mia believes it was an accident; she claims that she trapped herself in a room, and her bloody fingernails were evidence of how she tried to get out and get help.
Someone is stabbed in the neck with a pair of scissors. Another person dies in a traffic accident. Blood stains the hands and clothes of people after one particularly violent encounter. Mia imagines that someone close to her attacks her and tries to kill her. Jade’s mother jokingly threatens to punch someone in the face.
At least 30 f-words are joined by about half as many s-words. We also hear the c-word. Other profanities include “a–,” “h—,” “b–tard. God’s name is misused at least once, and Jesus’ name is abused twice.
Alcohol is widely available and consumed at a couple of teen-centric parties. Teens drink beer and smoke as well.
But Jade and Riley—under the direction of their strict, seemingly all-knowing mother—largely steer clear of that stuff. Jade declines booze at a party (even as Mia downs a shot). And when Riley’s friend tries to get him to smoke a cigarette, he seems both curious about and frightened of it. (Mia picks him up and takes him home before his resistance crumbles.)
Jade and Riley’s mom likes Mia a lot, but she knows Mia has a more checkered past. So she sometimes quizzes Mia to make sure that her kids’ friend isn’t a bad influence on them. (Mia insists that the worst she ever did was smoke marijuana once.)
Jade’s mom has no tolerance for her own children smoking. But under stress, she lights a cigarette and tries to smoke it in her car before she’s discovered.
As mentioned, the dead things we see will say or do most anything to get what they want—and that includes potentially masquerading as familiar, dearly departed loved ones.
People speculate that these grim beings know all of our darkest secrets once they enter their bodies. But there’s no hard evidence that that that’s true, or they wouldn’t twist those secrets into lies.
And under their influence, people can act really horrifically, too.
A bulldog is notoriously smelly.
For all of its faults, Talk to Me is effective.
And, perhaps surprisingly, this R-rated horror flick reinforces some messages taught by the Bible from the time of Moses: Don’t mess around with the supernatural. Don’t try to talk to the dead. Don’t be sucked into the quagmire of the occult.
If it weren’t so graphic and so grotesque, you could almost imagine Talk to Me serving as a spiritual cautionary tale. Why, youth group leaders could show it to their kids and say, “See?! This is why we don’t play with Ouija boards!”
But it is so graphic. It is so grotesque. And it does exactly what it sets out to do: It scares, it disturbs, it unsettles, it horrifies.
I don’t think I need to retabulate the legion of problems in Talk to Me. Hopefully by the time you got to my description of a foot-sucking ghost, you already had pretty much all you needed to know.
You could argue that this movie is something of a cold, white hand itself. Take hold of it, and you see things you can’t unsee. And perhaps it’s wise to think twice before saying, You can come in.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
