They Talk

The person who shot this knew what they were doing but no one else connected with this did. It kind of had a story, if you can say this is about a guy who hears voices, but that's about all there is to it. It's as if totally random scenes are just strung together, even love scenes that just seem to be inserted for no reason. The movie was all over the place, as if they couldn't decide what this was suppose to be. The lead actor tried, but every supporting actor was awful. Worst of all, were the accents. Although they show a car with a Missouri license plate, it would seen most of the cast was foreign and English was not their first language. While the movie is in English, some actors really struggled with their lines, making listening to the bad dialogue even worse. No chemistry between actors, no scares, no suspense, just a mess and a waste of time.

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.

Okay what can you say about a low budget foreign movie, the tries surprisingly hard to pretend that it was filmed in America. Everyone speaks with a European accent, but we have American flags flying everywhere and a Missouri license plate on one of the vehicles. Most of the actors/characters really need to wash their hair and take a bath, it has a dirty, grungy, smoky feel to the entire movie, which really does nothing to enhance the movie, and actually took me out of it a number of times because all I could think of is my God they need to take a shower. The pacing is incredibly slow, nothing unusual for a low budget foreign horror movie. The plot overall is predictable and plodding. Acting is so so, playing bunch of people that you can't understand why they have anything to do with each other, but that's pretty much the norm for modern horror films. It feels low budget, it looks low budget, it is low budget. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it just gets old after a while. Since it's basically a free movie on a free service, there's not a lot to complain about. Would I watch it again? No. Do I regret watching it? Not really. It gave me something to listen to while I was folding clothes.

This movie is incredibly slow, i don't know what other way to say it. It starts well, acting is great and is very dark and bleak but... I just lost interest along the way.

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.