The debut feature film from directors Danny and Michael Philippou Talk to Me has been winning over audiences around the world at various festivals, but with the film now landing in theaters across the country, it’s taking hold of viewers. Rather than being an entirely straightforward approach to a horror movie, the filmmakers, who earned a following with their RackaRacka YouTube channel, deliver a number of mysterious and ambiguities in Talk to Me, some of which have left audiences scratching their heads. With Talk to Me out now in theaters, we’re here to help clear up some of the confusion about the movie’s tragic finale.
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WARNING: Spoilers below for Talk to Me
The premise of the movie focuses on a ceramic hand, which is said to have formerly been the appendage of a figure who could contact the dead. Whatever the truth of those claims might be, the hand does effectively allow people to connect with another realm and even allow their bodies to be inhabited by spirits, so long as they’re willing participants.
While Mia (Sophie Wilde) and her friends Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and Riley (Joe Bird) first seemingly communicate with the other side in a harmless way, when Riley becomes possessed by the spirit of Mia’s dead mom, Mia doesn’t want the spirit to leave. However, this results in whatever has possessed Riley refusing to let go, even going so far as to intentionally injure its host to the point of leaving Riley unresponsive.
Given how frequently Mia has been communicating with the other side, she no longer even needs the hand to be able to see entities from beyond, and has visions of the nightmarish realm in which Riley has been captured. The spirits Mia sees also claim that they have the power to make Mia believe things that aren’t really happening, which includes a spirit impersonating her father, resulting in her seeing her real father and stabbing him in the neck with scissors in a near-fatal attack.
Whether it’s her own fractured mental state or because she’s genuinely being given messages from beyond, Mia decides that the torment must come to an end. She takes Riley out of the hospital and leads him in a wheelchair to seemingly push him into traffic to end his suffering. Instead, we see that Mia instead is thrown into traffic, but despite her injuries, she gets up and walks back to the hospital.
As Mia walks through the halls of the hospital, she sees that Riley is now responsive and with his family, while also seeing her own father. Despite her bests efforts, Mia can’t communicate with her father as he enters an elevator to leave, with the lights slowly turning off in the hospital. Left in the darkness, Mia then appears in front of a group of teens all playing with the ceramic hand she played with earlier, confirming that Mia has died and is now a spirit reaching out from beyond.
The mythology of the film leaves a number of elements about the experience unanswered, such as whether it was Mia who intentionally sacrificed herself to save Riley in the film’s finale or if something else intervened, but we’re given enough clues to know that Mia has crossed over to the other side, potentially allowing for a reunion with her mother. The nefarious nature of the spirits, though, might mean that Mia was never contacting her mother in the first place and the entire ordeal was orchestrated by malicious figures.
Talk to Me is in theaters now.
What did you think of the film’s ending? Let us know in the comments or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!
