Harefooted Halloween: Talk to Me

What I Liked: A somewhat unique take on the horrors of drug addiction, grief and depression.  When you grab a porcelain hand and say certain phrases you see ghosts and can get possessed by them.  Instead of being disturbed the users walk away with an adrenaline rush and euphoric high.  The catch is if you do it for too long it’ll fuck you up.  You’ll start seeing spirits outside of hand sessions and those spirits will trick you into doing bad shit like murder.  The deeper you dive the more past trauma comes to the surface which makes you want to use the hand to search further for answers but you try to quit the hand and you can’t and you get the idea.  While this is all a thinly veiled metaphor it still works.

The actors in this film act way more like actual teenagers than what you normally see in horror movies.  The way they goof around with each other, the subtle yet clear dynamic divide between acquaintance vs friend, everyone’s attitude is either everything-is-a-joke or everything-is-annoying, the predilection to film everything with their phones and post it to social media, the way they put up walls to protect themselves, how cruel they can be one moment and then amiable the next, etc.  If this supernatural hand existed in real life and teens got ahold of it I have no doubt they would use it how it’s portrayed here.  They would get “high” off it and in between “hits” place a joint in its fingers as a gag to take a toke and place it on their crotch and thrust it like a dick.  All low brow (but admittedly kinda funny) shit that feels completely true to life.

And the design of the hand is cool.  It’s open in a shaking position with an attached wrist so it can be propped up on a table or flat surface.  It’s all white but entirely covered in writing and graffiti (another thing teenagers would totally do).  This is a much more alluring look than if it resembled a real person’s amputated rotting extremity.

What I Didn’t Like: While the setup is well done the picture starts to lose me a bit when ghosts begin to appear outside of hand sessions.  It becomes murky if what you’re seeing is really happening.  That can be fine if handled delicately but in this case it tends to clash with what’s been established.  In the beginning the rules for using the hand are nice and simple and easy to follow, but then after a while there’s a certain sense of we’re-making-this-shit-up-as-we-go.  I think the filmmakers knew where they wanted the movie to end but had a little trouble getting there.

Overall Impressions: You can see flashes of other films in here like Brain Damage, The Addiction, The Babadook, It Follows, etc. but that combine well enough to be its own thing.  The first half is more successful than the second half in my opinion.  I like the concept of teens using a paranormal hand to get giddily fucked up on.  It’s a party and they’re having a blast.  That’s a great subversion of expectations because normally these quasi-séance scenes would be played very seriously as the scariest thing they’ve ever experienced, and now the hand must be destroyed but the ghosts are still haunting them and so on.  Here the juxtaposition of going from “haha, this hand thing is the shit!” to later “omg, this hand thing is absolutely fucking up our lives!” is wonderfully refreshing.

Unfortunately as it goes the picture meanders a touch.  It’s not clear where the story’s going or what it’s building up to which could be a good thing.  Unpredictability can be pleasing as long as the payoff satisfies.  This one left me scratching my head a little.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression though, I like this movie.  The camera work, acting, editing and symbolism are all fantastic.  It’s the story and lore that gets hazy after a point.