I’m going to bet that this buzzy Aussie fright film is going to become the thing-to-see with a group. This is what going to the movies is all about, right, the shared experience of being scared out of your wits?

Written and directed by brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, who hail from Adelaide, Australia, making their feature film debut, “Talk to Me” is the story of a group of young people, who get their, ahem, hands on an embalmed hand encased in hardened clay and covered in runic signs. The hand allegedly once belonged to a psychic. In a pre-credit sequence, we see a young man looking for his brother at a raucous party, breaking down a door, getting his brother out of a room, only to have two very horrific things happen. This is BEFORE the opening credits.

“Talk to Me” is about the terrible trouble young people can get themselves into, and Lord knows they can. We are introduced to an extended family. The single mother is Sue (the great, dazzling Miranda Otto of “The Lord of the Rings”), a no-nonsense, foul-mouthed, protective matriarch. Sue has a adolescent daughter named Jade (Alexandra Jensen), who has a “Christian” boyfriend named Daniel (Otis Dhanji). In spite of his professed beliefs, Sue doesn’t trust Daniel. Sue also has a young son named Riley (Joe Bird), who is younger than Jade and seems innocent and curious. Mia (Sophie Wild, who plays Sophia Western in a PBS production of “Tom Jones”) is a friend who spends so much time with Jade, sleeping over and sneaking out at night with her, that she is a member of the family. Mia actually lives with her father, who is a widower. Mia desperately misses her dead mother and has questions about the circumstances of her death.

Jade, Mia, Daniel and Riley find themselves at a party where a mischievous friend and schoolmate named Hayley (the outrageously charismatic, nonbinary Zoe Terakes) takes out the hand and asks for a volunteer to take it, ask it to, “Talk to me” and then add, “Let it in.” I know this sounds like a variation on those awful Ouija board films. But it is much scarier. When the first volunteer says “Talk to me,” he gets a glimpse of a festering, bloated corpse sitting across the table. When the volunteer says, “Let it in,” he is possessed by the creature. Those watching have 90 seconds to get the hand away before the possessed person remains possessed. That is the simple, diabolical premise of the film.

What happens after that you must see for yourself with a crowd. “Talk to me” is the scariest film to appear on the scene in a long time, and Wild, who is the standout in the film’s ensemble, has the poise and more importantly the eyes of horror film legend Barbara Steele (“Black Sunday”), the muse of many horror filmmakers of the 1960s and ’70s. Like Steele, Wild has very large eyes that she and the Philippous brilliantly use to scare the bejeezus out of us (second to her eyes in terms a scariness is a feral, furry goldenrod sweater Mia wears). When Mia takes the hand, she thinks she sees her dead mother, and she wants to see more. Even worse things happen to someone else.

“Talk to Me” suggests a slightly less cerebral and less mystical Ari Aster film with a good measure of Aussie grindhouse and J-horror served up with a pinch of Sam Raimi’s cruel humor. One of the most noteworthy things about this Adelaide-shot effort is how integrated the people on the screen are and how infernal the hip-hop soundtrack becomes. The Philippou brothers have a bright future ahead with “Talk to Me” as their calling card. Their diabolical hand is an obvious and convincing metaphor for the horrors of drug addiction, giving the film an extra, real-life kick. Let it in.

(“Talk to Me” contains profanity, extreme violence and suggestive material)

Rated R. At the AMC Boston Common. AMC South Bay, Landmark Kendall Square and suburban theaters Grade: B+