They Talk

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.

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.

Too bad the storyline died halfway through . It could've been a descent movie....but it just got stuck in its own bullcrap . No scares....little suspense...lost interest.

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 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.