Talk to Me

I remember when Barbarian came out and was getting insane praise. People called it original and thought-provoking and clever, and they loved how this movie that had no hype came out of nowhere and blew them away. And I was alone, wondering if any of these people had watched movies before, because it was a lazy rehash of things done better in other movies. Here we are again. Talk To Me got a lot of buzz as this out of nowhere new horror instant classic. Atmosphere, awesome concept, intelligent … and I again have to wonder what people saw in this movie, because woof, this is not good from a storytelling standpoint. Every problem in this movie can be traced to the script. The direction, the music, the acting, all of that is good. I’ll give it that. But the script is atrocious. Absolutely, irredeemably atrocious. Roger Ebert coined the phrase “idiot plot”; he used it to describe movies wherein events only unfold because the characters have to act like idiots. Talk To Me is one of the biggest idiot plot movies I’ve ever seen. And before anyone comments, yes, I know horror movies somewhat depend on bad decisions. But there’s a difference here. Take a slasher movie for example; stupid teenager hears a noise, goes to investigate, gets a garden implement in their face. Idiot decision, right? But that decision is isolated. They made a bad decision, but no one else can reap the knowledge learned from that bad decision, because they died alone in the basement. Talk To Me isn’t about a body count. Th characters ignore more red flags than a Chinese military parade, and they do it WITH FRIENDS AROUND, and THE FRIENDS MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES. And then the main character compounds more mistakes on top of it. Nobody ever learns, nobody ever shows growth or intelligence, nobody has any deductive reasoning powers whatsoever. They touch the stove, burn their hand, and say “oh, a wise guy, huh, well take this!” and touch it again. And again. And again. I can excuse one bad decision to kick things off. I can’t excuse characters showing the collective intelligence of a garden slug on repeat, because that’s the only way things move forward. Speaking of idiots, our main character Mia is not only an idiot who thinks if she keeps banging her head against the wall that the wall will crumble, she’s also a terrible person. Everything bad that happens is because she is a terrible friend, a selfish idiot who doesn’t care about consequences, and a gullible moron. If this movie had focused on her friend Jade, this still wouldn’t been a great movie, but she would’ve been a sympathetic protagonist. There is nothing sympathetic about Mia. Nothing. She single-handedly ruins the lives of several people by her complete inability to make logical, learned decision, and caused the death of at least two people. Following her makes this movie worse, because you have to endure her making the wrong decision over and over because of the most selfish reasons. And then there’s plot holes galore. The biggest one involves the ritual around the haunted object and what happens when one of the characters gets permanently possessed. The movie sets up the rule that, to break contact with the other side, one has to release their grip on the item and then blow out a candle. A kid gets permanently possessed, but they let go of the item. So, after dozens of people including cops and EMT’s have been through this place, and the family and friends have been in there as well, and it’s been days since the kid was admitted to the hospital for injuries, the candle is still lit? Are we supposed to believe that? And how is a near-catatonic, critically injured person supposed to recreate the ritual so they can get their soul back, especially when their body is possessed by a demon? The demon won’t cooperate. And then there’s the obligatory “track down the previous owner and get help” scene, which goes nowhere. He just says no. The end. WHY HAVE THAT SCENE THEN?!? Talk To Me’s script is a train wreck. The writers had a story to tell, and even though it followed a miserable, wretched excuse for a protagonist, even though it required every character to suffer catastrophic brain damage, and even though the story violated its own rules and logic consistently, they were bound and determined to tell that story. It’s a damned shame, because this has a cool concept and a great atmosphere. But the writers couldn’t be bothered to write a script that was any better than a 3rd grade creative writing project. I may not have cared much for Barbarian’s lazy, hacky lifting of good parts from other movies, but its worst crime was not living up to the hype. Talk To Me made me feel dumber for having watched it. I don’t understand how this got hype at all. This should’ve been consigned to the same bin as your average January Blumhouse release.