They Talk to Me (2021)

Alex, a sound engineer, accidentally records mysterious voices: disturbing messages from the afterlife who warn him against an imminent and terrifying danger. Amanda, with whom he shares a terrible secret, re-emerges from his past. The appearance of the young woman triggers chilling paranormal phenomena that leave behind a trail of corpses. Is she the danger the voices of the dead speak about?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.