TALISKER: Volume One is the brainchild of writer/director Carolyn Corbett. Due to her long-standing friendship and former classmate relationship with actor Michael C. Hall (NYU Tisch School of the Arts), she modeled the main character after him. After witnessing people jump to their deaths from the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, Carolyn felt compelled to save those souls by resurrecting them in her screenplay. This emotive motive is what ultimately fuels the story of TALISKER.
Agent Thomas Keating (Michael C. Hall) is a covert operative working for the shadowy organization Mantis. He sits alone in a room, quietly wrestling in his mind with something unsettling — he is not entirely human. He has abilities that set him apart. Yet, we don’t know exactly what that is. A disembodied voice breaks the silence, pointing to a glass of water on the table in front of him and asking what he would do with it.
Then, in a flashback, we find Keating in the field, running hard and calling in his position, as he’s being attacked by nanodrones sent after him by the even more shadowy Covenant. As he fades, his mind fills with visions of Jane Hillman (Lindsay Ayliffe), the woman he was sent to save but arrived too late to rescue.
Keating winds up inside a sprawling plantation mansion, conscious but unable to move his body. Two men drag what appears to be Keating’s lifeless body into the mansion as a feathery figure observes from the top floor window. He eventually hears a voice that slowly reveals why he is at this mansion and who he is.
“Agent Thomas Keating…is a covert operative working for the shadowy organization Mantis.”
Suffice it to say, TALISKER: Vol. 1 is a thinker. It opens like a The Twilight Zone episode — surreal and cerebral, with a mystery box quality that slowly pulls back the curtain on the world Corbett has built. The plantation mansion where Keating finds himself is the perfect vessel for that kind of storytelling. It’s large, lavish, and completely empty. Isolating. Which makes it the ideal black box for our protagonist, masterfully brought to life by Michael C. Hall, who does what he does best: narrating. He tells you exactly what he thinks, and you believe every word of it. Anyone who watched him on Dexter already knows how he does it, and that same instinct is working here in full force.
What makes TALISKER: Vol. 1 work as a first chapter is that it sets up the story. You’re with Keating from the start — you understand who he is and what drives him, and Hall makes sure of that. But the film doesn’t stop there. The world quietly expands beyond the walls of that mansion, and by the time the final act lands, the stakes have grown into something truly apocalyptic. It helps to know that the story was born out of September 11th — out of watching people trapped in those buildings and feeling that helpless, desperate need to save them.
TALISKER: Vol. 1 is a quiet, confident first chapter from writer-director Carolyn Corbett — one that trusts its audience to sit with the mystery and let the weight of its emotional core settle in. If this volume is any indication of where the story is headed, the world of TALISKER is one worth following.
"…not entirely human. He has abilities..."
