Hi there,
It’s me, Lyn.
Something that you probably don’t know about me, mostly because it’s quite incongruent with my aesthetic and general vibe as a person, is that I actually really love horror stories, specifically horror films. I didn’t always feel this way about the horror genre, and I’m certainly still a little bit squeamish when it comes to gore. Slasher films are a big no thank you for me. After all, there’s a reason I’m the only one of my sisters that did not take the route of having a career in the medical field. But as long as the horror isn’t gratuitously gory or riddle with jump scares for no reason, I’ve found that I really enjoy them.
I used to really dislike all horror across the board to the point I wasn’t willing to try anything in the genre. It’s sort of hard to remember that phase of life now that I enjoy so many pieces of media that fall into the horror or horrific category. What changed my mind was a course I took in college for my Religious Studies degree with one of my favorite professors, “Religion and the Paranormal.” We studied the intersection of religion with the paranormal through the lens of horror film, examining the ways that the sacred reacts to, shapes, mutates, and changes the profane into something horrific, which arguably might also be something divine. It was a thrilling intellectual challenge that forever changed the way I saw horror, not as something yucky to be scared about, but rather a poignant and visceral example of something important. My brain loves the challenging puzzle of figuring out what the horror in the story is saying, and what we as the audience can take away from it.
All of this is a prelude to say, I love discussing horror stories, and that from time to time is going to pop up here on the blog. If horror isn’t your thing that’s totally fine, I’ll catch you on the next installment. But if it is, today is one of those days that we’ll be doing a horror film deep dive.
Today’s obsessed! focuses on the 2022 film Talk to Me. If you haven’t seen it, there will be spoilers for the film, so just a fair warning in case you’d like to watch it spoiler free first and then come back to this discussion. If you don’t care about spoilers or you’ve already seen the film, read on!
*Something that is important to note, in case you are a reader unfamiliar with the academic study of religion: Religious studies does not mean theology. Religious studies is the intersection of religion with things like culture, history, anthropology, literature, politics, science, music, dance, film… the list goes on. It is simply looking at the world with the focal point of religions and their various overlaps and interplays. Sometimes religious studies does look at religious theology to help analyze the deeper nuances of something, but it isn’t learning the elements of those theologies in order to subscribe to them. ALL that said, this analysis is going to be one using a religious studies lens and therefore talking about religion, so if that isn’t your jam, no worries at all. It happens to be mine! :)
**Trigger warnings: Horror, gore, self harm, suicide, drowning, animal death
Talk to Me
The A24 indie horror film Talk to Me was Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Phillippou’s directorial debut. It received generally positive reviews from critics and quickly became a fan favorite to watch and dissect. You can find excellent discourse online already about the film’s deeper meanings and motifs. I’d like to try to present somewhat of a new angle on the film (at least from what I’ve seen) by examining it through the lens of religion and the paranormal.
The paranormal in Talk to Me: The paranormal in this film is easy to identify. The film pivots around the embalmed hand of a medium that some teenagers have got ahold of. When the hand is grasped and the “user” says the words, “Talk to me,” the user will see a spirit. When they follow up with the words, “I let you in,” the spirit will enter the user’s body and possess them until the connection is broken by the removal of the embalmed hand. A candle is also lit at the beginning of the ceremony and blown out at the end, which the characters tell us is to open and close “the door.” It’s a new twist on the classic concept of a Ouija board.
Possession, of course, is a concept that often gets tied to the cultural consciousness with demonic presence. The behaviors exhibited by the users and the visuals that accompany the possessions in the film certainly indicate a sense of foreboding evil. But the grotesque and destructive nature of the spirits we see is to be expected. This is a horror film after all. When we scratch under the surface we are left to question if the spirits are evil only because they’re put in opposition with our cast of characters. It’s clear that they want interactions with humans, but it is unclear the motivations why they might want to keep or trap a human with them in the spirit world. And it’s clear that they are deceptive in nature for the aim of this goal with the spirit that keeps interacting with our main character, Mia, crafting multi-layered lies to make her question her reality and cause harm to others and herself. But the intent is unclear—Do these spirits want human blood spilt for a reason?
Because of the ambiguity of the spirit’s purpose in their evilness, it presents the question: while certainly the opposing force in this story, are the spirits truly a representation of the immoral?
So, what else could be an “evil” force in the film? If the spirits aren’t meant to be the only evil in this film, or at least force us to question if the paranormal should be automatically defaulted to evil, what else does it show us that we can interpret as bad or negative? To me, the answer seems to lie in our cast of characters themselves. Throughout the film, we’re presented with the characters confronting the impact of their actions on others. Mia is impacted by her mother’s suicide. Riley is injured and almost killed because Mia chooses to let him use the embalmed hand. Mia, Jade, and Daniel all have messy web of impacting each other with their choices, something they’re all dealing with before they even interact with the paranormal as seen in one of the establishing scenes in Jade’s bedroom where Mia complains about her taking a call from Daniel.
The most damage comes from Mia herself, or at least by her hands. One could argue that the damage comes from the spirit that is possessing Mia rather than Mia. I would counter that from the very first scene when we’re introduced to Mia, it’s established that she’s struggling to the point she’s already negatively impacting those around her, including her equally grieving father. Mia uses the embalmed hand, first because she’s curious, and then again because she likes the physical effects it has on her body. She makes choices that are self-serving when it comes to the interaction with the hand and the spirits, and ultimately she pays the price for them. She stabs her own father, a literal manifestation of the damage she’s caused in their relationship. Her choices injury Riley, and the regret of those choices lead her down the path where she’s willing to cause further damage to “fix” things, even if that thought is one that is planted in her head by the spirits manipulating you.
The film seems to paint depression as the true evil force in the film. Already vulnerable people, like Mia, are more willing to use the hand to commune with the spirits. Mia’s depression paints her reality. And it isn’t accidental that the words to access the hand are “talk to me,” a phrase that could be used to be supportive during someone having trouble with mental health.
Commentary on communication: When we apply this questioning to the true oppositional force (the spirits being a symbolic representation of one’s mental health struggles), we can see a clear commentary on communication emerge from the film’s themes and symbols. The outstretched embalmed hand as a open-handed offering. Having to complete essentially a handshake with the it in order to commune with the spirits. That handshake of greeting being a literal gateway. All are markers of communication. Interestingly enough, left-handedness has been considered a sin in multiple religions across time, and the embalmed hand is a left one, forcing the user to make a left-handed handshake with them in order to communicate.
Hands are repeated throughout the film with many close-ups. Mia picking at her yellow-orange nail polish on multiple accounts. A creepy spirit hand brushing Riley’s face. Mia’s mother’s spirit having grotesque hands with wood splinters under her nails. Mia’s own broken fingers when she dies at the end of the movie. Hands are everywhere in this movie, and they serve as a visual image to remind not only of the themes of communication, but also to nod to the actions being done by each person’s own hands. Aside from our voices, hands are the body part that do the most communicating. They greet friends, they display irritation, they caress lovers, they point directions. Hands even become someone’s voice if they have none with the use of sign language. They are the tool used even for written communication.
Touch is something that the spirits lack as indicated when the very creepy old man spirit asks Mia, “Why won’t you touch me?” The spirits literally lack a corporal body now that they are dead. To use hands as the mechanism to communicate with the dead, when the dead can not physically feel anything anymore is brilliant. Physical contact is required for the spirits to be heard or seen at all. Often the communication we desire the most is from those that have passed away and we no longer can talk to in our lived experience. The film presents us with the complex interplay of the spirits longing for physical contact coupled with humans longing to talk to the dead, and the clasped union of hands being the bridge between these two desires. And also shows us how far one might go to resolve things unsaid or deeds left undone.
Allegory for drugs? Many interpret the teenagers interactions with the embalmed hand as an allegory for drugs or substances. This interpretation makes sense. The teenagers have a physical reaction to letting the spirits possess them, almost like a high. They take risky actions to use the hand again, and experience intense side effects from seeking the “hit” of using the hand. There’s a scene early on between Riley and his friend discussing cigarettes, asking if they give you cancer straight away. Of course, we know that one doesn’t get cancer instantly from only smoking one cigarette, but the implication is that even the use of drug or substance one time does damage. With the hand, damage is done to all of our characters after just one use. Substance use is certainly something that happens when one is struggling with their mental health.
The atmosphere of the gatherings to use the hand is at house parties where other substances like alcohol and cigarettes are being used. Everyone gathers around to participate, like one might in a social gathering to take a hit of a shared substance. The sequencing in cinematography of the teenagers taking turns using the hand also mirrors how a drug use at a house party might play out with quick shots of different possessions paired with up-tempo music. I don’t disagree that the allegory here is clear, using the hand and the possessions that result from it can clearly be interpreted as drug use.
However, I would like to argue that the use of the hand could also be interpreted as religious ecstasy. Religious ecstasy also alters a person’s conscious experience. It can present in erratic behaviors like shaking, dancing, spinning, speaking in tongues… All behaviors that the teens exhibit during their possessions. Religious ecstasy is usually accompanied by feelings of euphoria, and most importantly, visions of the spiritual. The teens all experience intense euphoria while using the hand and quite literally see the spirits. Religious ecstasy can often also be triggered in group settings, like the house party atmosphere.
If we interpret use of the hand as religious ecstasy, the entire process of being possessed by the spirits could be seen as a religious encounter. An encounter with the religious means that each individual’s experience of the spirits holds more meaning that just a drug hit. While I don’t argue here that the spirits are some kind of divinity, at least not in the sense of being a force of “good” or a godlike entity, I do think that interaction with the spirits creates a connection with a realm outside of the profane, the keystone for both paranormal interactions and for communing with a higher sense of spirituality.
Lack of objective truth in religious experience: Another key point of interest for me is the spirit that seems to attach itself to Mia during her first use of the hand. There is a motif of water throughout the film. It presents for the first time when we meet the spirit that Mia first allows to possess her, a woman who looks like she’s drowned. Mia stays in this possession over the maximum 90 seconds, and it is implied that this spirit continues to possess Mia after the connection with the hand is severed. Water shows back up with the storm that follows that night, which is the first time we see evidence that the spirit is still our realm when her hand touches Riley’s cheek while they are sleeping. At different points water, notably the noises of water bubbling or dripping, shows back up, especially when we see Mia’s mother’s spirit.
We get told that the spirits sometimes will take the personification of people that the user knows. The motif of water linked specifically to the appearances of Mia’s mother’s spirit leads us to interpret that the drowned woman has likely taken on Mia’s mother’s appearance in order to more effectively communicate with Mia, since her mother is who she wants to see and who she is most likely to trust. As we progress through the movie, Mia’s mother’s spirit gets progressively wetter and more bloated, implying that the drowned woman’s spirit slowly loses her disguise as time passes.
This unique skill of the spirits demonstrates to us the lack of objective truth in religious experience. Mia seeing her mother can be symbolic of how we choose what we want out of religious experience. What speaks to us and what we find to be true in an experience will rise to the surface. Mia deeply does not want to believe that her mother was so depressed that she committed suicide. The spirit tells Mia what she wants to hear and that leads to Mia’s denial of the truth about her mom’s death even when Mia’s father presents her with concrete evidence with the note her mother left behind. The truth of Mia’s experience with the spirit is a reality built all on Mia’s own perspective making the religious, at least in this film, fallible.
So, what does the paranormal/sacred say in this film? My opinion is that the paranormal in this film argues that people can use the ends to justify the means. There’s a couple arguments online that this film demonstrates that the occult is dangerous. This is an easy conclusion to come to since the teenagers drastically suffer from their interaction with the paranormal hand. But I think that true argument that Talk to Me poses underneath that is that we use religion to cope with things that are painful for us. And with that, it offers the critique that if we only use the spiritual to find healing for the things that pain us, we will not be able to properly heal from it. While we might be able to find solace from the pain, we must also do the work within ourselves to heal. If we don’t we run the risk of causing further damage to those around us.
When Riley ends up in the hospital, his mother blames Mia for his condition. Mia, tearfully, counters that it is not her fault and she didn’t do anything. And while Mia didn’t literally do the physical damage to Riley (the spirit possessing his body did), Mia is technically, at least partially, at fault for what happened to him, because she is the one who gave him permission to touch the hand and commune with the dead. Mia uses a flawed judgement call, knowing that she has found a thrilling experience with the possession and that maybe Riley will too. Instead, Riley is completely overtaken. If the hand and subsequent possession is an allegory for the spiritual, then we can view Riley’s incredibly damaging possession as a someone who fully descends into a toxic religious or spiritual mindset, an example of brainwashing.
Mia’s usage of the hand does not heal her. Her use of it also causes Riley to use it. His usage of it does not heal him. Their interactions with the spiritual only offers them temporary solace, and in fact, seems to ultimately do more damage to them good.
Of course, this is only one interpretation of the film, and good film like all good art can be interpreted multiple ways through multiple lens. The beauty of a well done horror film examined through a religious studies lens is that you can strike multiple arguments about how the paranormal plays out across the story. Even if you disagree with my takes here, I hope you’ve found this film analysis interesting!
I’ve really enjoyed diving back into some of my film analysis roots, so much that this post took me even longer to write than I expected.
Let me know if you’ve seen this one!
xoxo, Lyn