We were promised the most scary possession story of summer... What to do at the arrival of the new horror film distributed by A24 Hand (Talk to Me in original version). After the shock SkinamarinkWhat is this summer horrific production worth? Answer to read below...
Speak to my hand
Mia and her best friend Jade are caught by strange videos circulating on social networks: a acquaintance of their high school would have found an embalmed hand that she would use to interact with the spirits... No more is needed to convince them to take part in one of these adolescent meetings, some of them dealing with a vulgar hoax. However, when Mia decides to lend herself to the game in front of a range of smartphones ready to film her, the hypothesis of the farce soon falls to the water...
Where A24 put the grapple on a horror film, it rarely takes more for the cinemaphile attention to be focused on the work in question. And if Hand the American firm is content with a distribution role, it has sufficed for the canvas to panic upon the arrival of this feature film supposedly « Most scary » since beautiful lurette. A rhetoric that is at work for almost all of the current horrific releases, but the first trailer images and the production far away from the American studios could allow some hope to float.
Yesja 2.0
However, from the first minutes of HandIt's the cold shower. Bathing in a dreadfully dark but especially dreadfully greyish digital photography imagery, the film is a basic 2023 transposition of the visuals of Ouija sessions or other rotating tables. If the teens yell at Sia, get their ears bleeding on US rap listened too loud and overload their TikTok app, that's the only singularities that bring Hand to the tripotée of films of spiritism that already engulf the horror ray: the recent Host, Paranormal activity, Insidious or in the most classic Meeting Kurosawa or Don't turn around.…
If Hand is the artificial conglomerate between all the filmic matter mentioned in the brief listing of the great names of the subgenus of spiritism and the Ten-movie classic, the movie doesn't bring anything new. Worse, the first half only struggles to start and offers, so to speak, absolutely nothing significant. We simply draw the drafts of a gallery of characters characterized almost exclusively by their respective traumas (the death of a relative, the suicide of a brother, a father absent...), without ever achieving to make them palpable... Empathy never develops and fear, at the same time, struggles to manifest itself.
Horror surprises
If the second segment Hand offers a little more detailed narrative and some well-established horrific visions, the atmosphere will remain generally warm, as will the widely forgotten photo. We will hold a vision of possession – a segment of a few seconds but which will remain what the film offers most striking, imbued with the demented end of Society but with a darker image tone – and a scene of self-harm (based on broken cartilages), dispensing some bursts to the flat encephalogram of this well-conceived horror feature.
Too bad because the twin project directors – Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou YouTube channel RackaRacka – could have brought a touch of Australia in their realization, by poking in their country's liabilities for example. The country of kangaroos is moreover not avarous of good horrific shots, the recent Blackwater, The Ruins (from the director of Swalowed) or Mister Babaook Are some obvious examples... Unfortunately, the duo is content on this project to make flat studio film, perfectly harmless, which unfortunately will be forgotten very quickly. Nothing to do with the deaf terror surrounding Skinamarink We were talking about a few days ago...
The 4K Ultra HD will still be mine! 😉
[...] cadaverics oppose the infernal oranges/yellows) attend in 1080p to a board of Ouija 2.0, they participate here in a real possession that screams to the dead his [...]