A soul-shaking modern horror classic has been given a fun date-night twist in Blumhouse’s remake of the 2022 Danish film “Speak No Evil.” Beyond the usual Hollywood impulse to try to boost arthouse audiences to big-box office levels, there was really no reason to remake Danish filmmaker Christian Tafdrup’s eerie hell-is-other-people scenario. But in doing so, writer-director James Watkins has traded malevolence for a more subdued sense of misadventure. The moral? Lingering fear is not fit for the multiplex.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with remakes, which, when executed wisely, should leave room for a different chef to take on an established dish. And at first, the basis of this “Speak No Evil” effectively mirrors the modest appeal and eccentricity of the original’s basis for how tourists relate. Under a standard Tuscan sun, American married couple Louise (Mackenzie Scott) and Ben (Scoot McNairy) sizzle with a British family sharing their lavish villa. They are a charming, straightforward doctor named Paddy (James McAvoy), his smiling wife, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and their mute, reserved son, Ant (Dan Hough).
Ant befriends Louise and Ben's daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler), an equally withdrawn 11-year-old. After dinnertime banter between the adults proves lively and inspiring, a plan soon emerges for everyone to meet up again in the UK, at Paddy and Ciara's rustic and isolated northern farm property.
Yet over a long weekend in the countryside, the hosts’ brisk hospitality betrays an edge, which has mostly to do with Paddy’s mercurial, pushy personality and his flashes of ill humour towards Ant. But also with the glee with which he pushes Louise and Ben into icy discomfort, as if he’s playing a parlour game of social norms – mocking Louise’s vegetarianism, cheating them out of their dinner bill and taking open displays of lust too far. In these scenes, it’s hard to take your eyes off the beaming McAvoy, who’s like a diabolical juggler of elements both benign and dangerous. You know he’s going to throw something at you if you’re not prepared.
But as Ben and Louise, no longer the safest of unions, argue over what their rescue line is, Ant seems determined to secretly communicate to Agnes something very serious about the situation they find themselves in. And that’s when the unsettling path that the new film has, up to this point, largely shared with the Danish original suddenly forks, sending its characters to a very different ending – one with a very different tone and perspective.
The central deviation is that this “Speak No Evil,” with its more pronounced humor and catharsis, treats the other movie’s scenario as a gruesome comedy of manners rather than a brutal, unheroic descent. In other words, it’s no longer a true horror. But, hey, it’s hard to sell tickets to those who feel bad, so a trap becomes a maze, the weak become strong, and the predators learn a little about being the prey. Who wants to leave the theater remembering how unsettling it was at first to see good, observant people ignore every protective instinct, a ruthless commentary on our society thirsty for belonging?
And of course, some of the differences here are admirably quickening, because Watkins builds a solid trajectory, including the amusing needle drop of an '80s song that's best left unrevealed. It's also endowed with a great cast, starting with McAvoy and extending to McNairy and Scott's exquisite marital purgatory. But when the evil of “Speak No Evil” isn't spoken of, then a disservice has been done to the original's terror and the skill with which it refused to take us to safety.
'Don't speak ill'
Classification: R, for intense violence, language, some sexual content and brief drug use.
Duration: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Playing: In general release on Friday, September 13
