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According to Variety, after its Sundance Film Festival premiere, the Australian horror film Talk to Me is heading to A24 in an extremely costly deal.
Talk to Me stars Sophie Wilde, Joe Bird, Alexandra Jensen, Otis Dhanji, Miranda Otto, Marcus Johnson, Alexandria Steffensen, Zoe Terakes, Chris Alosio, Ari McCarthy, Sunny Johnson, James Oliver, Cass Cumerford, Jett Gazley, Sarah Brokensha and more.
A24 bagged 18 Oscar nominations, with its Everything Everywhere All at Once, bringing home more nominations than any other film this year. The movie singlehandedly nabbed 11 nominations, including nominations for best picture, best director, best actress, and even best-supporting actor and actress.
Talk to Me and A24 deal is supposedly valued in the high seven-figure range
The film follows Sophia Wilde as teenager Mia, who, on the anniversary of her mother’s death attempts to contact her mother with her friends by seance. The film takes a dark turn when the alive and dead worlds collide, leading to Mia getting tormented by supernatural visions.
Twin filmmaking duo Danny and Michael Philippou directed the film. The directorial debutants are popular on YouTube as RackaRacka, where they produce horror videos with a comedic bent. Talk to Me was written by Danny and Bill Hinzman with the concept by Daley Pearson.
The movie was praised for its breathtaking performances and raw gory sequences. The distributor has set plans to give Talk to Me a wide theatrical release in the summer.
The film's synopsis, according to IMDB, reads:
"When a group of friends discover how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand, they become hooked on the new thrill, until one of them goes too far and opens the door to the spirit world forcing them to choose who to trust: the dead or the living."
In an interview with Danny and Michael Philippou, the duo revealed how they wanted to dip their fingers into filmmaking.
Danny said:
"All of the RackaRacka stuff was always training for us — we’re obsessed with doing things practically, whether it’s stunts or special effects makeup, so all that experience helped this and we knew how we’d shoot certain sequences or pull off certain effects. Even the final sequence was always something that’s lived in my head for ages. There’s a lot of stuff like that"
To which Michael added:
"But what we were excited to explore or thinking about is more character and story [which] we weren’t really able to explore with YouTube. That was exciting to us — to be able to create a script that’s layered and works on many different levels, doing that blend of genres seamlessly."
Danny then continued by saying:
"Yeah, because there were no scripts for RackaRacka. It was always just go on a location [with] a rough idea. It was never a muscle that we tried to flex or tried to explore, so it was amazing to be able to do it finally [with] “Talk To Me.”
Talk to Me is positioned in the tradition of scary features such as Saw, Paranormal Activity, and Insidious. Along with Everything Everywhere All at Once, A24 distributed The Whale, Aftersun, Causeway, Close, and Marcel the Shell With Shoes On also earned Oscar nominations this year.
