They Talk

A thriller with its plot-heavy scenes creating a weighty, incomprehensible story. Meanwhile the impressive acting surfaces here and there amidst all the unanswered questions. The documentary film subplot, itself, is abandoned, so too many of the movie's characters disappear, leaving the effective protagonist alone with too many computer scenes, and too many drone shots. There's a gorgeous synthesizer score and the special effects are top-notch--and practical. Only a few obnoxious stutter-cuts interrupt what the director maintains in traditional style and pace. Rocio Morales is superb as the movie's most tragic character. There's a large quantity of atmosphere, and the movie's art direction and locations support this. If only the writers and editors had collaborated more on communicating suspenseful information over just creating beautifully photographed suspense, and some quality gore.

While working on a documentary project, a sound engineer continually receiving messages on his equipment informing him of a deadly presence coming to him eventually comes to believe his reconnecting with a now-troubled childhood friend is to blame and races to stop a supernatural threat.

This was a decent enough if underwhelming genre effort. What works quite nicely here is the idea of the noises being recorded and the whole inability to believe what's going on with them. The initial manner in which these first start to show up to him, with the noises appearing as background noise in their videos before turning into much more overt pieces that sound much more inhuman and mysterious. The idea of turning to the scientist for help and tracking down the cause of the communications is a bit of fun here with the gradual discovery and revelation of the location concerning their deaths focusing on building a rather impressive overall setup that pays off rather well here. Combined with the shocking ending that's hard to see coming, these are all that work for this one. There are some major issues to be had with the film. The biggest drawback here is the pacing which just manages to make for one of the most lifeless and inert investigations in the genre. Rather than bring about a sense of fear and macabre menace looking into the cause of the messages he's receiving, there's very little here that scares with seemingly endless shots of looking at recording setups and computer screens hearing muffled voices over and over again. Hardly any of it makes an impression and renders a lot of the film to be a thoroughly tough pill to swallow with the lack of energy or interest in what's going on during this part of the film. That also leads to the main big drawback with the film's main focus appearing to get away from the killer spirit to appearing as a drama by not making it the featured part of the film. The incidents here regarding the supernatural figures at the center of the film are kept to such a small part of the film's running time that there's the opportunity to mistake the kind of film this is by not going for the more enjoyable facets when it can. The rather uninvolving ending that explains nothing and contains the only real gore or threat of the spirit doesn't help either, and a rather ridiculous subplot involving his girlfriend thinking he's supposedly going through an affair with a friend takes out even more time away from the killer figure here. These all combine to hold this down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language, Nudity, Graphic Violence, and a sex scene.

Well, the synopsis for this 2021 horror mystery "They Talk" definitely sounded interesting enough. This movie was one that came in under the radar, but sadly as quietly as it came it also went. Writers Vinicio Canton, Stefano Ceccarelli and Chiara Barbo just didn't manage to put together something extraordinary here.

Sure "They Talk" had potential, but the storyline just collapsed in on itself, suffering from a slow narrative and having absolutely nothing entertaining or worthwhile to offer. So the script made for a poor transition from paper to screen. I certainly wasn't enjoying the storyline here as directed by Giorgio Bruno.

There were a couple of interesting enough visuals here and there throughout the course of the prolonged 96 minutes that the movie ran for. But it just wasn't enough to do much of anything to alleviate the shortcomings of a boring and mundane script.

I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, and that is usually something I enjoy when I watch movies. However, in "They Talk" it just didn't really count for much of anything, since the actors and actresses virtually had nothing worthwhile to work with in terms of storyline, dialogue or character development.

For a horror mystery then "They Talk" was just downright boring and pointless. There wasn't anything scary here, and even the voices and their messages were just worthy of a single shrug of the shoulders.

My rating of "They Talk" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.

I want to start with what bothered me the most about this movie. They try to sell really hard that this movie is filmed in America - they make a show of panning down to a Missouri license plate; the local diner (called "Eats") has American flags draped in no less than two or three places throughout the interior; the menus in the diner each feature an American flag imprinted on them; the cabin in the woods has an American flag flying outside.... Yet every single actor/actress in the movie has an foreign accent, despite two of the main characters supposedly raised since they were young in an orphanage in America. The roads don't look anything like roads in America. The hospital looks less like a modern American ER and more like a hospital you might see in the 1930's. The movie was filmed in Italy with Italian actors. Why on Earth would you try so hard to make it look otherwise. I'd have enjoyed it more if they'd played up the Italian angle - but as a second (third?) generation Italian immigrant, I might be slightly biased.

OK, so the movie itself.... This is your basic EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) flick up until about the last thirty minutes or so. Up until then, it's a little slow, but then things get weird. I'm not really sure why what happens happens. It leaves you with more questions than answers.

The acting is ok. It does feel like a low budget film, though, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just is what it is. It's good for a weekend night, "escape from reality" flick but don't expect anything spectacular.

I caught right at the start the opening credits mentioning Calabria, and realized this was basically an Italian movie. I was concerned because the listing said English, which worried me that I would be watching a badly dubbed version, but in retrospect that probably would've been preferable.

This is a film set in America, and almost none of the main characters has an accent that could discernably be called American. This is not a problem since America is a land of many people except that the main character is described as having been born and raised in America, in Missouri, and has a Scandinavian accent thick enough to have a speaking role in "The Last Kingdom" or "Vikings".

It's all mildly amusing but it's not the reason this movie is so bad. That falls almost entirely on the writing and the overall acting.

Firstly, the depiction of EVP or Electronic Voice Phenomenon is absolutely cartoonish. The incredible crystal clear audio clarity with which these ghostly voices are picked up makes it as though people would be unable to record anything anywhere because they'd be constantly picking up ghosts talking over everything else.

A whole lot of things depicted here are very cartoonish in how they come across, which speaks a lot to either a gross misunderstanding of the subject matter, a severe lack of research, or a very bad writer.

There's constant little things that break what little immersion this film has. The way a whole lot of the dialogue and behavior comes across feels like it was written by someone who has never gone outside and experienced the real world. It comes across as if written by a child imagining this is what grownups sound and act like.

One of the better comparisons to this sort of dissonance I can make is the example of trying to translate a story using a computer translator rather than a native speaker.

On top of this, the story itself is just a boring mess that seems to be trying to set up something, but never actually gets around to it. Then it goes for a completely incoherent twist ending that feels as though a whole lot of the original idea ended up being cut out and they forgot to update the ending accordingly.