One of the biggest highlights of the first year I covered SXSW in 2023 was seeing Talk to Me. At the time, there were no promotional clips, no trailers, only a single still of the movie and its logline to get an idea of what I was in for. I went into the SXSW Talk to Me screening with a lot less knowledge than I normally do, especially since my job effectively drowns me in the internet abyss day in and day out.
That might be one of the reasons that Talk to Me knocked me flat on my feet. Talk to Me remains one of my favorite horror movies of the 2020s so far, an energetic combination of partying teens, spirit summoning, devastating emotional depth, and repulsive makeup effects. It was an incredibly impressive debut by its directors, Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, who’d been making YouTube skits and working behind the scenes in Australian television up to that point.
So, when the first trailer for the Philippous’ second feature, Bring Her Back, was released, I felt a skepticism building up inside of me. Bring Her Back broadly appeared to involve rituals, possession, and some teenagers in its initial trailer. I began to wonder if the Philippous were about to simply dip into the same well from which they’d created Talk to Me.
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