Talk to Me Ending Explained: What Happened to Mia and Riley?

An Australian supernatural horror film starring an embalmed, severed hand (among rising stars Sophie Wilde and Joe Bird) has taken over Netflix’s Top 10 Movies.

Talk to Me follows 17-year-old Mia (Wilde) who attends a house party where the main event is taking turns being possessed by a severed hand. The teen becomes obsessed with talking to the spirit of her dead mother Rhea (Alexandria Steffensen), after her best friend’s little brother, Riley (Bird), is overtaken by her. 

As the lines between reality and hallucinations blur, Mia finds it harder to resist her mother’s spirit — even when she instructs her daughter to become violent. 

The film kept viewers on the edge of their seats up until the final scene. So much so that when the credits rolled, many people were still left wondering what happened to Mia, Riley and other characters seemingly in danger of Rhea’s violent streak. 

Here’s everything to know about the Talk to Me ending and what the filmmakers have said about a potential sequel. 

Warning: Talk to Me spoilers ahead! 

How did Talk to Me end?

In the last minutes of Talk to Me, Mia completely descends into madness after her father, Max (Marcus Johnson), reveals that her mother’s death was not an accident as she previously believed. 

When Max reads Rhea’s suicide note out loud, Mia starts to hallucinate and believes that she’s being attacked by her father.

Unable to break from this false reality, she stabs him in real life. Rhea’s spirit then instructs her daughter that the only way to save Riley from his possession — which has put him in the hospital — is to kill him. 

What happened to Riley?

Seemingly following her mother’s instructions, Mia kidnaps Riley from his hospital room where he’s been bound to a wheelchair. Jade, his older sister and Mia’s best friend, witnesses the two getting away and heading towards the highway. 

Though Rhea’s spirit is telling Mia to push Riley into oncoming traffic and kill him, Mia finally breaks free from her spell and jumps onto the busy highway herself. 

What happened to Max?

Though it seemed like Mia had left her father, Max, to die, the final scenes of Talk to Me show him leaving the hospital in an elevator.

Mia, who wakes up in the hospital after seemingly sacrificing herself to save Riley, sees him fully recovered and talking with their friends. 

But when she tries to get the attention of her father and her friends, no one seems to realize that she’s even there.

What happened to Mia? 

After unsuccessfully trying to communicate with Max, Riley and Jade, Mia passes a mirror and realizes that she doesn’t have a reflection. When she looks down, she notices that her hands are disfigured. For all intents and purposes, it looks like Mia has died. 

The final minutes of the horror movie show her being engulfed in darkness until a match is struck, revealing a candle with someone’s hand extended over the flame.

When she grabs it, Mia is suddenly transported to a house party in Greece, and the man holding her hand tells her, “I let you in.” This seems to show that Mia has become the new severed hand that people use to access the spirit world.

Will there be a Talk to Me sequel? 

A month after its theatrical release in July 2023, A24 announced that a follow-up film was in the works. Talk 2 Me will reportedly be directed by the same brother duo, Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou. Danny was also listed as a co-writer for the script along with Bill Hinzman. 

Though the Philippou brothers told The Hollywood Reporter in July 2023 that they wanted to shoot a sequel “so badly,” they weren’t sure what the story would be about. 

“I guess a question would be, would you continue the story around Mia and those characters, or do you go to another part of the world?” Michael said. “That’s a debate.”

In February 2024, Wilde told GamesRadar+ that she didn’t know if she would be reprising her role as Mia in Talk 2 Me. 

“I feel like it’s still a bit hush hush because I mean, the boys [filmmakers Danny and Michael], they’re such workaholics,” the Babygirl actress said. “So I don’t know, it’s all up in the air.”

Danny told IndieWire in March 2025 that they had developed two scripts for the Talk to Me sequel and hadn’t decided “which is the best avenue to take.”