The Latest Addition To Netflix’s Horror Library Is A Creepy Masterpiece

"D'you reckon they give you cancer straight away?" wonders a teenage boy during Talk To Me’s opening act. He's been bragging about selling cigarettes to another kid at school, a hustle that only sounds cool when you're 14.

“I don’t know,” says his friend Riley, a more cautious soul. “Don’t smoke it?”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” the boy replies, and lights up. But instead of smoking the cigarette himself, he holds it out to Riley, and sneers when he refuses to take a drag.

Arriving after a violently homicidal prologue, this scene sets the tone for a perceptive take on teenage life that taps into how kids dare each other to make stupid decisions. Will you get cancer from smoking a single cigarette? No, but we’ll soon witness a more high-stakes version of this peer pressure dilemma when some teens start experimenting with supernatural forces.

Both terrifying and ingenious, Talk To Me introduced the Philippou brothers — a pair of former comedy YouTubers turned indie directors — as the new champions of Gen-Z horror, remixing classic teen tropes with a more grounded tone. Playing with the awkward clash between adolescent overconfidence and insecurity, their cast of Australian high schoolers, led by Sophie Wilde as troubled protagonist Mia, feels charmingly real.

Echoing generations of supernatural thrillers about seances and ouija boards, the action centers on a cursed object: a mannequin-like embalmed hand, purportedly belonging to a long-dead psychic medium. This morbid little prop is inert until a human participant takes action, and according to urban legend, it comes with a strict set of rules. First, you light a candle. Then you clasp the hand and say, “Talk to me,” at which point a ghost will appear. If you then say “I let you in,” this randomly selected spirit will possess your body. But if you fail to let go within 90 seconds, your undead visitor will stick around and haunt you into an early grave.

We see the outcome of such a haunting during the prologue, where a boy stabs himself to death at a party, but most of Mia’s friends seem unconcerned about the potential dangers. Bolstered by a youthful sense of invulnerability, they see the hand’s powers as a thrilling party trick, filming each other getting possessed like it’s a paranormal Jackass stunt.

For Mia, the experience becomes a seductive rush. Her life has been shaped by grief since her mother’s death two years ago, and when she tries the hand for the first time, we watch as a spirit overtakes her body, growling threats as the lights begin to flicker. It’s scary as hell in the moment, but when Mia resurfaces, her expression shifts to a disbelieving grin, and the room explodes into applause. “That was the best one yet!” someone yells. Soon she’s trying it again and again, channeling a series of spirits in a lurching, hysterical montage of laughter and screams.

Her best friend Jade, however, is visibly alarmed, and we can understand why the two girls have such different reactions. While Mia is tempted by the idea of communicating with the dead and the thrill of feeling alive after a long period of depression, the risk-averse Jade enjoys a comfortable home life with her mother and younger brother Riley, a sweet-natured kid who decides to use the hand after seeing the older, cooler kids try it out. In a more Hollywood-style movie, this peer pressure allegory would be cringeworthy, but Talk To Me is too fast-paced to linger on corny messaging. Instead, we watch in mounting dread as Riley embarks on his own ill-advised interaction with the afterlife.

Like Jordan Peele or Sam Raimi, the Philippou brothers understand the overlap between horror and comedy. Jumpscares and punchlines rely on similar buildups, and Talk To Me’s possession scenes keep us on a knife’s edge between humor and fear (which is, of course, why these teenagers keep using the hand themselves). Between the scarier sequences, we can relate to Jade and Riley’s immature sibling bickering, and the adolescent posturing among their clique. Yet by the final act, this story evolves into something startlingly bleak. Like the encroaching doom of It Follows, Mia is tormented by forces beyond her control.

We’re currently suffering through a period of overzealous irony. Too many filmmakers are concerned with self-awareness and genre-savvy humor, whether it’s employed in retro franchise revivals (Scream; Ghostbusters) or projects that rely on nostalgic tropes (Stranger Things; Fear Street; Ti West’s X trilogy). In Talk To Me, the Philippou brothers take a more sincere approach to genre-savviness, and it pays off.

All of the building blocks here are familiar — the teens tempting fate by summoning the dead, the ominous list of rules, the slasher-style prologue — but they’re taken completely seriously. There are no winking acknowledgements that these characters exist within a horror movie. Their decisions and reactions feel authentic, both in the casual hangout scenes and in Sophie Wilde’s fantastic lead performance in a role that requires her to be sympathetic, messy, and sometimes deeply unsettling. For both her and the two directors, it’s an explosively memorable introduction, making the Philippou brothers’ next supernatural thriller one of the most anticipated horror movies of 2025.

Talk To Me is now streaming on Netflix.