It is customary, when we get an English-language remake of a European horror, to wring hands and despair at audience’s unwillingness to read subtitles. Consider that done. Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil, a Danish cracker from 2022, is out there on the Shudder streaming service, and it is well worth your time. James Watkins’s version easily justifies its independent existence, however. Four first-rate performances find new energies in the story. The shift in nationalities adds other interesting angles.
This time around Paddy and Ciara (James McAvoy and our own Aisling Franciosi), a boisterous English couple, encounter Ben and Louise (Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis), reserved Americans living in London, while on holiday in a sunny part of southern Europe. They are not perfectly matched but still form an uneasy bond fleeing dull Scandinavians and, upon leaving, make one of those half-hearted promises to meet when back at home. An invitation comes for the expats to visit Paddy and Ciara in the west country. Not quite knowing why, they bundle their daughter into the car and sally forth.
It is surely no spoiler to say Speak No Evil ends with more than a jolt of violence, but nothing in that closing section is so upsetting as the social discomfort in the film’s opening hour. Watkins’s script gets at a conventionality Americans don’t always see in themselves. Paddy and Ciara are looser, louder, more informal.
Initially one may reasonably side with the hosts, but, as events progress, it becomes clear that Paddy is the sort of bully who uses his own gregariousness as a weapon. Lighten up! Have another! Where’s the harm! It’s a tremendous performance from McAvoy. Speaking in his own Scottish accent, he shows how embarrassment can be exploited to exercise power. Franciosi is just as creepy with her bland compliance.
Ben and Louise find themselves whispering in corners as they weigh the apparent inappropriateness of their new friends’ attitude to their disabled son. There is some Harold Pinter in there with the genre tropes.
It is a measure of the tension accrued that, when it comes, the explosion of violence feels, if anything, like a welcome release. So much so that it is easy to ignore the absurdity of the gothic solution to mysteries earlier raised. Bracingly uneasy entertainment.
