Netflix Recommendations Thread 3.0

Talk To Me

Ended up sticking this on last night and thought it was a lot better than I expected - in particular based on a lot of comments and reviews I had an idea that the third act would go off the rails, but to my mind it actually stuck the landing quite well. Thinking about what about it worked for me, it brought Smile to mind - I wasn't impressed by that film because while it had some well-executed moments, as a story it was a fairly derivative hodgepodge of better films without any real sense of a character with any depth or individuality at its core. Talk To Me, by contrast, is cut from the same cloth as It Follows - in that there's something weird happening that the protagonists try to understand, but there's no Big Lore Explanation and in any case, it wouldn't help. It doesn't matter why or how the Weird Thing is happening - just that it is happening. It's written that way and focused firmly on the characters, to the extent that you can see how easy it would have been to make the story about a non-supernatural problem without any significant changes.

It also put a bit of a spotlight on something that I found myself disliking about the new Evil Dead films - they're fairly bleak affairs, which is fine, but for me their fixation on having the Deadites be evil forces tormenting their victims falls flat because none of the protagonist characters ever felt like more than a trope or three thrown together. (It also helps that in Talk To Me, not only are the supernatural forces less one-note, but the characters in the film also acknowledge it when particularly cruel behaviour manifests, including the great line "Yo, this spirit's a c*nt!")

I can see why the third act might be frustrating for some - there's a certain sense of inevitability about how it plays out that, for me, made sense with what we were shown about Mia and her situation, but if you're expecting it to be a different type of film, it would probably leave a sour taste.