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Is it justification enough for Speak No Evil to remake a 2022 Danish horror purely for the spectacle of a beefed-up, foaming-at-the-mouth James McAvoy hollering his way through The Bangles’s “Eternal Flame” with teary-eyed, yet distinctly murderous sincerity? In short, yes.
James Watkins’s rehash of Christian Tafdrup’s coolly sinister original, which goes by the same title in English, is the cleaner, tamer, and less daring of the two. Yet both films play up to their cultural peculiarities, and if you’re willing to trade in the Nordic bleak for a little Anglo-absurdity, this new iteration has its own charms.
The remake, for about two-thirds of its runtime, is largely identical in plot and dialogue. An American couple, Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben (Scoot McNairy), on holiday with their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler), meet an English family – Paddy (McAvoy), Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and their mute son Ant (Dan Hough) – who invite them back to their West Country farm. Paddy pressures the vegetarian Louise into having a bite of his recently slaughtered prize goose. Ciara disciplines Agnes for chewing with her mouth open and not eating her greens, right in front of her own parents. Louise and Ben look past the red flags up until it’s already too late.
And while Watkins pulls the original’s final punches, he instead swaps psychological horror for slasher chaos, which works particularly well with how believably pathetic and incompetent McNairy makes Ben, and how Louise’s increasing frustration tells the audience all they need to know about their marriage troubles. These people are nice enough that you want them to live, but also not so nice that it isn’t entertaining to watch them, in a panic, try to hurl a quickly burning Molotov cocktail out of the window without setting themselves on fire in the process.
Speak No Evil, in both iterations, deals out cosmic punishment to those who let their attachment to social niceties get in the way of their survival instincts, yet there’s a palpable difference between the two. In the original, the Americans are Danish, and the English are Dutch. And while I confess to not knowing the intricacies of Danish-Dutch relations, the Danish couple’s inability to leave a bad situation stems largely from the fear of not wanting to appear gauche in front of two people otherwise presented to them as urbane, free-spirited intellectuals. The sinister vibes are issued almost purely through flat-toned passive aggression.
Here, Paddy and Ciara (but mostly Paddy) are plainly awful from the start, but excuse themselves through the distinctly British conceit of “jokes” and “banter”, which leads the Americans to brush it all off as quaint eccentricity. “We’re in the country, our normal isn’t their normal at all,” Louise insists. Paddy and Ciara’s farmhouse is one of those consciously messy country abodes, decorated with faux-humility that would successfully conceal their wealth if it weren’t for all the suspiciously expensive-looking artwork scattered about the place. While this might be a flashy, American production (courtesy of Blumhouse, behind the Insidious movies and Get Out), it’s also the distinctly observational work of a British writer-director.
And then there’s McAvoy, delivering one of the most impressively repugnant performances of the year. It’s a return to the animalistic id, certainly, of The Beast from M Night Shyamalan’s Split, but also a viscerally, uncomfortably familiar take on entitled masculinity delivered with a self-satisfied smile, as a gossamer cover to the violent rage below. There’s very little scarier than that.
Dir: James Watkins. Starring: James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Aisling Franciosi, Alix West Lefler, Dan Hough, Scoot McNairy. 15, 110 mins.
‘Speak No Evil’ is in cinemas from 12 September
