Sundance: 'Talk to Me' is a handshake with Hell itself
by Jason Adams
See one horror movie about grief and you've seen every horror movie, or so it feels sometimes. Dead children, siblings, parents, spouses -- the genre is littered with beloved corpses winking back at us from the other side of oblivion. I'm writing this on day one of virtual Sundance and I've already seen three movies of this sort! But we keep coming back to the Babadook Special because it works. It's what we fear the most. Death for ourselves is one thing, but seeing the people we love the most slip away is something tangible; something that we'll all experience and then be expected to exist on the other side of. When I was little it was losing my parents that I feared the most of all.
For teenager Mia (newcomer Sophie Wilde), the lead in the Philippou brothers' unsettling new horror flick Talk To Me (playing Sundance 2023's Midnight program), it is her Mom that she's grieving...