The Emotional Realism of Teenage Grief in ‘Talk to Me’
Violet Burns
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Grief is a horrible symphony that you can’t really hear at first. The first movement of grief, the one everyone around can hear, almost doesn’t count. Your dad is dead, sure, but there’s an element of ceremony in the immediate response to death, a gesture towards community. You choose a dress. You eat little quiches at a funeral surrounded by adults who say nice things about him. Casseroles arrive at the house unannounced. People visit, some from afar. Maybe you break down and scream, cry in public. But you’re supported, held. People listen and understand—for a while. Then one day they want their Pyrex back.
I didn’t expect to leave the embalmed-hand-party-game teen possession film in tears, forever changed, but Talk to Me is a remarkable first feature that defies all sorts of expectations. Talk to Me has been haunting me for months, and like its protagonist Mia (played compellingly by Sophie Wilde), I’m more susceptible than most. My dad died of a sudden heart attack when I was fourteen. Since that loss, my means of coping have habitually spiraled into self-destruction in pursuit of connection and escape. Talk to Me’s authentic, judgment-free portrayal of teenage grief has allowed me to access a new level of empathy for my younger self.
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The complexities of grief are often given shallow treatment in teen horror, where grieving a dead parent sometimes serves as a mechanism to move the plot or flesh out an otherwise translucent character. If we see grief at all, it’s reduced to flattened signifiers: a casket lowered into green turf, a sea of black formalwear. Grieving teen characters tend to externalize their feelings in ways that real-life hurting people rarely would. Teenage horror characters are often rendered in hyperbole, perhaps as an attempt to capture the heightened arousal (all sorts) and magical thinking that color the adolescent experience. This fantasy of adolescence can create distance between the viewer and teen characters on screen, dulling the impact of tragedy. Older viewers can also judge teen choices from the security of our fully formed prefrontal cortexes.
On the surface, Talk to Me has many parallels with A24’s other recent hit Gen Z party horror Bodies Bodies Bodies. Both films provide immersive glimpses into youth culture, utilizing propulsive soundtracks and the spectacle of hedonistic party settings mediated through devices. While Bodies Bodies Bodies uses dialogue to excoriate younger generations’ adoption of trauma therapy-informed language and supposedly narcissistic need to document their lives, Talk to Me largely uses visual language to articulate the unspoken emotional needs of kids who grew up plugged in. In Talk to Me, social media is just as pervasive in the fabric of the film as it is in real life.
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The pathos of peer pressure is hard to portray earnestly without veering into moralistic territory. But Talk to Me approaches the subject grounded in the realism and character focus of a good family drama. Largely eschewing teen horror archetypes and cliches, the film taps into the authentic emotional undercurrent of social dynamics that can contribute to collective pursuits of risky and ultimately harmful behavior. The Philippous give us relatable young people who can reach us, and devastate us through the screen. And they don’t need to go overboard with supernatural extravagance to do it. Their less-is-more approach creates an emotionally intimate experience that lingers long after the credits roll, and once it’s in it wants to stay.
The loss of a parent during one’s teen years can disrupt a crucial stage of identity formation, making it difficult to establish and maintain a core sense of self. In a developmental stage defined by separation from caregivers and an intense need to conform with peers, bereaved teens face a triple bind. They can’t choose to separate from a dead parent to discover self; having a dead parent separates them from the peers they’re naturally moving towards; and they’ve lost a critical pillar of support throughout the process. Seventeen-year-old Mia is the first character I’ve seen so unmoored in this specific way on screen.
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Mia describes a recurring nightmare about looking in the mirror: “My reflection is gone. Like I don’t exist.” Mia’s disconnection from her own sense of self is painfully familiar. Even as I write this, I feel like a liar. My own history sounds too far-fetched, and my memories are patchy and thin. That’s the complex PTSD, which keeps memories from being encoded into long-term storage, and huge swaths of my life are impossible to recall because I didn’t have the resources to be present for them. To this day, I struggle to access my own thoughts and feelings, and my sense of self is slippery at best.
In the old video Mia returns to again and again, Mia’s mother Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen) playfully prompts younger Mia to respond to “the haters.” This is the only glimpse we get into Rhea on a good day—irreverent, high energy, and completely adoring. Through their banter, Rhea is modeling strategies for building resilience and being comfortable with herself. Rhea poses a list of superlative questions about who’s the cutest, the funniest, the best, and each time they both respond “me.” The old version of Mia has no trouble declaring love for herself, knowing she is seen and loved as she is. Laughing, Mia pushes her mom away, knowing she isn’t going anywhere. This video is a summation of the foundational security that Mia has lost.
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Visual signifiers of separation and connection, doors in particular, are recurring motifs throughout the film. In her initial framing, Mia is separated from the world of the film behind her through shallow focus, and separated from the audience by a pane of glass. Highlighted by director of photography Aaron McLisky’s dynamic cinematography, dark, blurry figures mill about in the background, and Mia is lost in her headphones. She’s escaping the two-year anniversary of her mother Rhea’s suicide by watching old videos of them together on her phone. The video feels more real to Mia than the shadowy adults around her, and we get the sense that she’s not really there, disconnected from her surroundings, especially her surviving father (Marcus Johnson). Dissociation is an adaptive coping mechanism that allows us to disconnect from moments that feel unbearable. Losing a parent can be unbearable.
Mia isn’t obviously crying out for help, and she doesn’t externalize her pain like we often see bereaved teens do in horror films. In Scream, Sidney Prescott’s grief seems to fortify her self-awareness, and she articulates how trauma shapes her feelings and needs in real-time. I didn’t have those skills, and neither does Mia. Like Mia, I learned to internalize my pain to make myself more palatable to others.
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When she’s with her friends, Mia comes to life: vibrant, silly, ready to lend a helping hand. Her deep need for support simmers beneath the surface, manifesting as teasing, jokes, and clinginess. She picks at her nails and tries to control her facial expressions when they might betray real feelings, unconsciously clenching her fists. Having completely written off her dad as a source of support, Mia tries to insert herself into her friend Jade’s family. When little brother Riley (Joe Bird)’s calls to Mia’s best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) go unanswered, Mia immediately rushes to pick him up. She genuinely cares for Riley, but this is also an excuse to escape into her preferred company. Everyone shapeshifts to get their needs met, but trauma survivors can be especially adept at this, making possession the perfect metaphor for what ultimately transpires.
The film’s lighting contrasts the cold, shadowy prison of Mia’s home life with the warm, supportive atmosphere fostered by Jade’s mother Sue (Miranda Otto). Sue is observant and intense, but her wry humor and inquisitorial edge belie a deep, steadfast well of present caring. The family feels secure enough to voice displeasure with each other when they feel it. Sue “know[s] everything” that’s going on with her kids (and by extension Mia) because she’s safe to talk to.
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Even when it’s revealed that Jade told her mom about Mia’s brief experiment with smoking pot, Sue has never weaponized that information. Jade’s mom is committed to keeping doors open, she’s the only person we see Mia trust with her actual feelings. With Sue, Mia can be honest and cared for at the same time. Although Jade’s mom remembers, Jade has to be gently reminded that it’s Mia’s mom’s remembrance day. Bumping up against this huge wound is too painful for either of them to sit with for more than a few seconds, so Mia quickly offers that she “just wants to forget about it.”
Talk to Me begins two years after Mia’s mother’s suicide, and her father still hasn’t been honest about the note she left behind. In the absence of meaningful communication, resentment festers. Mia hates being home and feels trapped there with a needy stranger that she cannot grasp. I know the feeling all too well. After my dad died, home was something to escape. I knew my mother wasn’t normal, but doctors didn’t discover the slow-growing brain tumor that explained her increasingly unhinged behavior until far too late. She slept too much and struggled with a growing list of functional anxieties I found mortifying—she couldn’t drive, go in stores, or encounter birds without screaming. With my dad gone, things kept getting worse, and that was my secret to hide.
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The worst part of unsupported teenage grief is the isolation of maintaining the illusion of okay. When I was home, I could be summoned for weird, depressing shit: to scratch gray flecks of skin from my mother’s increasingly unwashed back through the hole in her threadbare nightgown, to shake a coffee can full of rocks to scare away birds from the porch. These moments burned white-hot shame into my body, and you couldn’t have paid me enough to share them with anyone. That summer I went away to choir camp as a child, and I returned a manic pixie dream girl wielding the currency of her own warm body. Group kissing games taught me that I had something people wanted. And touching feels good, like magic. They had to love me, or I’d die. They talked to me. I let them in.
Finding community as a teen is always tough, but bereaved teenagers are more likely than average kids to struggle with acute social isolation. Kids who lost caretakers to a stigmatized death like suicide generally suffer the worst outcomes. As Jade painfully points out in a moment of frustration with her, Mia is only begrudgingly included in the group chat where she discovered Hayley’s videos of the hand. Teenagers tend to be uncomfortable with big emotions and reject others who remind them of their own.
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When Jade arrives at Hayley’s with Mia and Riley in tow, Hayley makes their displeasure known that they have to “babysit” the weird girl and little brother. When Jade tries to push back against Hayley’s hasty dismissal of Mia, Hayley retorts, “No, she’s not fine. She irritates the fuck out of me… She’s so clingy, man. It’s fucking depressing.” After several unsuccessful attempts at small talk, Mia finds her way into the corner to bemoan her weirdness. Jade suggests that she isn’t weird—she just needs to “loosen up.” This is when I started crying in the theater. It’s so fucking hard to connect when you’re drowning inside.
Just before the request for volunteers to play with the dead, we get a lingering close-up of Jade’s hand resting on top of Daniel’s. We feel Mia’s body jolt into high alert, suggesting an unconscious shock to her emotional system in an already unwelcoming environment. Mia feels excluded from Jade and Daniel’s relationship, and she likely internalizes their affection for each other as a two-pronged rejection of her. The dead hand can’t hurt more than that, right? So Mia volunteers.
Mia’s initial reaction to the hand is the most authentic: she recoils from the dead thing across the table with the full force of her whole body, shoulders tensed up to her ears, screaming and shaking wildly in abject horror. She doesn’t want to continue. But everyone is watching, and she doesn’t want to disappoint them. This experience is what she’s here for, so she ignores her better judgment.
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Barricaded inside my high school bedroom, my embalmed hand was Yahoo Messenger. I filled my nights talking to much older strangers online, and the attention filled a void with external validation. The thrill made me feel delusionally powerful. My first sexual experience was with a Latin teacher who flew in from another state. I gave him my address and told my clueless mother I was going to PF Chang’s. As soon as I got into his rental car, my body knew I’d made a mistake, but I still went with him to the shitty Days Inn by the mall. With time and new real-life connections, the Latin teacher’s hold on me would fade, but others I’d meet the same way wouldn’t let me go so easily. Mia’s first specter has a different face than the one that ultimately destroys her.
Hayley and Joss border on aggressive as they egg Mia on to invite the spirit in, laughing at Mia’s initial full-body terror upon seeing her first spirit. Even Jade tells her to shut up, not initially believing the reaction is authentic. The whole room joins together to get Mia, tied to a chair, to take the second step. Mia lets the spirit in, and in the space of a breath, she is fully possessed. The ease and speed of Mia’s first possession juxtapose the other possessions in Talk To Me, which are portrayed as violent, gasping, choking struggles. This hints at the emptiness Mia feels inside, her permeable boundaries.
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Once the hand is finally wrenched from her grasp (past the “safe” 90-second limit), Mia appears to regain control of her body. Hayley leans close to make sure that Mia’s okay, cupping her face–Mia likely interprets this soft gesture as genuine concern for her wellbeing, not relief at avoiding liability. Mia initially isn’t sure how to respond, but any misgivings she has are eclipsed by a multifaceted euphoria. Mia basks in the glow of the crowd’s attention, soaking up the social acceptance she’s craved for so long.
The film’s editing and sound design conveys the collective intoxication that the hand ritual provides, a shared activity that unites, delights, and scrambles the senses. This heightened atmosphere is perfectly reflected by the song choice for the film’s big hand possession montage. The scene propels us into the thick of party mode with a modern remix of Edith Piaf’s “La Foule”. The lyrics describe the allure of being swept away by the unpredictable energies of the crowd.
By combining immaculate cuts and technically difficult focus pulls with the actors’ organic movements to the music, the scene conveys a feeling of moving in unison. In this setting, Mia is finally part of the group. In the montage, Mia is physically embraced and embraces others. Her need for physical touch and closeness is accepted and reciprocated in this rarified collective space—when it was perceived as desperate and clingy just moments before the hand came into play.
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When we’re in pain, we look for anything that can help us escape it. This escape can come in many forms—drugs, alcohol, sex, social media, toxic relationships, or any combination thereof. To say that the hand represents any one of those things would be overly reductive. The hand provides Mia a temporary release from the burden of her own consciousness, but all escape is fleeting. The more we escape from reality, the more our reality becomes something to escape. Before she unwittingly sets tragedy in motion, Riley asks her how the hand made her feel. Mia describes the experience with dreamy intensity: “It felt amazing…. like I was glowing.”
Throughout Talk To Me, gatherings with the hand gradually dwindle in size until it’s just Mia alone with a poorly rendered projection of her grief. Despair and isolation warp our perception and reinforce existing beliefs that the worst will happen again. The thing that isn’t Mia’s mother keeps her to itself long enough to reinforce Mia’s belief that she is fundamentally broken. The biggest tragedy of the Talk To Me is that things could have gotten better, but Mia couldn’t see it. Some of Mia’s screams transported me back in time to when my world collapsed. There is a before and an after, there are certain sounds I’ve only made once in my life. Mia makes those sounds, and I want her to live.
Before I watched Talk To Me, I mostly held my younger self in contempt. I blamed her for endangering us, for her desperation, for establishing patterns I thought made no sense. But Mia’s pain makes sense. I can see so clearly why she reacts the way she does and how easy it is to spiral in her situation. Maybe I have always made sense.
Categorized:Editorials
