The end of the year 2023 is approaching as I'm writing this user-comment, and - as usual - many website and magazines are publishing their annual "best of" lists and rankings. The Aussie made "Talk to Me" appears in practically every list, and quite high to boot, so I tried to squeeze it into my viewing schedule before the year is over.

As too often the case, sadly, I must say I'm not overly impressed with it, although admittedly it does contain a few original elements and two or three genuinely frightening and shocking moments. One of the original elements is the basic premise. In "Talk to Me", demonic/spiritual possession is presented as the newest hype in party-drug sensation.

Forget taking pills or sniffing gas. It's sufficient to grab the embalmed hand relic and say the titular words, and you go into a trance where you get hallucinations of the ghosts of random deceased people that make you do all sorts of crazy stuff. The spectators obviously film everything with their smartphones and put it on YouTube or Instagram. Evidently, this is bound to go wrong, and it does when teenager Mia learns that one of her friends gets in contact with the ghost of her dead mother during his trance. Mia breaks the "rules" of the possession's maximal duration, and it has extremely painful consequences for the medium.

The idea is good, Sophie Wilde's performance is intense, and there are a couple of excruciatingly agonizing moments you won't forget very soon (featuring a teenager's face and a table), but there too many defaults and unanswered questions. For me, at least. Where does the embalmed hand come from? Why aren't there any adults aware of the new hype even though it's all around the internet? I'm sure these questions, and several more unasked ones, will be answered in a long franchise of sequels, prequels, spin-offs. I will watch those eventually, of course, but I was still hoping for a more satisfying original. In this genre, I liked "Smile" better.