Highlights
- Talk to Me is a terrifying and well-crafted horror movie with intense terror sustained throughout and a genuinely engaging story.
- The practical effects in the movie have a greater impact than the CGI seen in many modern horror films, and the performances, especially by Sophie Wilde, help sell the reality of the story.
- The ending of Talk to Me brings the story full circle in a morbidly poetic way, with Mia herself becoming the dead person she once communicated with, hinting at an endless cycle of tragic downfall for those who use the embalmed hands.
Talk to Me has been one of the biggest horror hits of the year, and part of that success is due to a beautifully poetic, hauntingly ironic ending that brings the story full circle. Sophie Wilde stars as 17-year-old Mia, who has grown distant from her father while grieving her mother’s death by suicide. When she’s invited to a party where everyone is communicating with the spirit world via a magical embalmed hand, she unexpectedly discovers a way to speak to her mother from beyond the grave. She ends up going way over the allotted 90-second window and leaves the portal to the world of the damned open, allowing all kinds of malevolent demons to sneak into the land of the living.
Not only is Talk to Me by far the most terrifying movie of the year; it’s also incredibly well-crafted. Directors Danny and Michael Philippou do a fantastic job of sustaining a feeling of intense terror from the moment the embalmed hand is introduced to the moment Mia finally meets her tragic ultimate fate. The story is genuinely engaging, revealing just enough information to keep the audience guessing at every turn. The practical effects are a lot more impactful than the CGI seen in a lot of modern horror movies. The actors all give impeccable performances, especially Wilde, that help to sell the reality of the story.
A horror movie is only ever as good as its ending. A really effective horror movie ending will leave the viewer feeling suitably unsettled as the closing credits roll and they leave the theater. The best horror movie endings have a devastating ironic bite, like the poorly timed mercy killings at the end of The Mist or Ben being mistaken for a zombie and shot dead after surviving to the morning in Night of the Living Dead. Talk to Me has a similarly ironic ending, as Mia pays her paranormal debt to the embalmed hand.
What Happens At The End Of Talk To Me?
After Mia lets her best friend Jade’s younger brother Riley use the embalmed hand for more than 90 seconds, he ends up stuck in a kind of limbo being tortured by the souls of the damned. Every time he regains consciousness, Riley tries to take his own life to spare him from his torture. Feeling responsible, Mia desperately tries to come up with a way to save Riley. The spirits convince her to get him in a wheelchair, take him out of the hospital, and push him into oncoming traffic on a nearby road. As Jade races to save her brother, the movie cuts to the backseat of a car where a human body slams into the windshield and brings the traffic grinding to a halt. It seems as though Mia might have pushed Riley into the road and Jade was too late to save him, but it turns out that Mia herself actually jumped in front of the car.
Mia is then mysteriously transported back into the hospital, where she sees Riley being discharged and leaving with his family with a smile on his face. She also sees her dad heading for an elevator, but he can’t hear her calling for him. Then, when she’s suddenly engulfed in darkness and finds herself on the other side of the embalmed hand, she realizes she’s dead and is now a part of the spirit world she became addicted to. She places her own hand on the hand, hears the ominous words “Talk to me,” and finds herself face-to-face with a frightened partygoer playing the cursed game in a foreign country.
How Talk To Me's Ending Brings The Story Full Circle
At the beginning of Talk to Me, when Mia first used the embalmed hand to speak to the dead, she was shocked to see a random dead man sitting opposite her. At the end, Mia herself has become the dead person sitting opposite a terrified partygoer using the hand to communicate with the spirit world. This brings the story full circle in a morbidly poetic way as the movie charted Mia’s journey from the living side of a mystical hand to the dead side. The first scene in which Mia saw a tormented soul foreshadowed the grim fate she would meet by the end of the movie.
This ending teases an endless cycle. People like Mia will keep using these embalmed hands to talk to the dead, they’ll get caught up in the dead people’s drama, and then they’ll end up joining them in the spirit world on the other side of the hand, luring even more people towards the same tragic downfall. There’s a lot to admire in Talk to Me – the focused direction, the cast’s strong performances, the old-school effects, the unbearable sense of dread – but this poetic, ambiguous ending elevates the film from a very well-made horror movie to a truly great horror movie.