It’s bold to center a whole horror movie on the kind of unwise behavior that makes audiences holler at the screen in exasperation. But to do it twice? Speak No Evil is a U.S. remake of a Danish 2022 thriller whose tension hinged on what it would take for its protagonists, a couple with a near-pathological aversion to conflict, to flee a weekend visit to an increasingly ominous Dutch family they met while on vacation. This new version, which was adapted by British writer-director James Watkins (of The Woman in Black), transfers the action to the U.K. and tacks on an action-heavy happier ending, undermining the unsettling effectiveness of its source material. Yet those choices also make the film a much loonier experience. While the Danish movie skewered the paralytic politeness of its main characters, especially patriarch Bjørn (Morten Burian), the American one very Americanly requires you to identify with its marrieds, Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise Dalton (Mackenzie Davis), and so forces them to eventually act, albeit ineptly. At first, I hated these changes, then I came around to begrudgingly admire them. There’s something to be said for the silliness with which the film treats Ben’s stifled masculinity and Louise’s self-congratulatory bleeding heart when the pair find themselves reluctantly shoved into the roles of action heroes.
And, anyway, the nastiness that made the original Speak No Evil so bracing also made it easier to shrug off afterward. Its characters were doodles of middle-class passivity, easy to discard as they trudged toward seeming doom. Ben and Louise, as annoying as they can be, are actual people — the movie insists on this by carving out time for us to understand the purgatorial plushness of their lives. They’re Americans who moved to London for a promotion that fell apart, leaving them well-off but isolated and jobless. Ben feels emasculated by his layoff and the sext-only affair that Louise had with one of the dads at their daughter Agnes’s (Alix West Lefler) school. Louise is exhausted by the way Ben keeps punishing her for this betrayal and feels like she was asked to give up everything for a move that’s left her husband emotionally absent. Agnes’s anxiety is worse than ever, and at 11 she still relies on a stuffed animal for comfort. In comparison to their constipated, cautious lives, Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (The Nightingale’s Aisling Franciosi) look downright liberated, holding dance parties in their hotel room and taking their son, Ant (Dan Hough), tootling around cobblestone streets on a rented Vespa in the Italian town where they’re all vacationing. They’re vibrant and fun, and Paddy’s a doctor, and when they ask the Daltons to visit their West Country farm, the invite catches the Americans with a desperate desire to get away and little else going on.
For an unasked-for remake, Speak No Evil has the benefit of an unusually fine cast. McNairy and Davis, both alums of Halt and Catch Fire, are perfectly exhausting as a pair of unhappy people who are just too avoidant to get together the momentum required for a divorce. Franciosi is half little girl and half unhinged siren as Ciara, while McAvoy, loaded with muscle and a toothy grin, plays Paddy as a charismatic psychopath who gives the game away early but who’s mercurial and magnetic enough to keep coercing his guests back. The film is way too reliant on the children, whose friendship creates one of the biggest implausibilities in this barely stable premise — Agnes, in particular, has to waver between terrified and trusting of their hosts as required by plot mechanics. But the adults are very good together, especially Ben and Paddy, who, as Louise looks on with despair, form the kind of toxic connection that’s led many a weaker guy into bullying to impress their bro.
The first Speak No Evil relied on the non-relations between the Danes and the Dutch with its main characters letting all sorts of slights and alarming behavior slide in the name of cultural differences and being good guests. That doesn’t really work with Americans and Brits, especially when Americans are tasked with being the overly conscientious, restrained ones. (Paddy, when talking about culling foxes, jokes about managing to find Americans who don’t like guns.) Watkins tilts toward class consciousness instead, but in expanding his characters’ backstories, he ends up turning the film into the story of a strange criminal encounter rather than the grim little parable the Danish version was. I didn’t mind that, ultimately, because while the remake loses something in ditching the original’s unrelenting drive toward darkness, it also avoids what it leaves unsaid, which is a borderline reactionary message about needing to overcome compliant liberalism to step up to protect oneself and one’s family. In the Danish film, that moral gets punctuated by a sneering bit about the main characters feeling pressured to leave their daughter behind in the company of an Arab immigrant, a queasy touch the new film acknowledges while defanging. In the new Speak No Evil, the ineffectual nature of the characters becomes not a shortcoming so much as a teased-out joke — a Straw Dogs moment that never arrives, leaving us instead to wince at these bumbling fools as they strive, however poorly, to save themselves.
