Speak No Evil (2024)
Christian Tafdrup’s “Speak No Evil” rattled me as view other films have done, so much so that it took a third viewing- removed from my experience of the film at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival- to really get my head around why it connected with me so much. In choosing to remake it, writer-director James Watkins takes some big swings to translate it for American audiences, and while some work, others feel like the film is Sideshow Bob, stepping on rake after rake, unable to get out of its own way to get back to the story.
There’s something uniquely nihilistic about Tafdrup’s film that just was never going to translate into a film mass audiences were going to go with. You simply cannot work this story into a satisfying payoff and resolution with as bleak a place the film takes the visiting family. Admittedly, there were a lot of cheers and applause during the final act in the screening I watched, but there was also a lot of “what the fuck are you doing?” that was part of the equation. Watkins is a decent genre director (I’m a fan of his 2012 film, “The Woman in Black”), but the direction he takes this story just doesn’t feel right when you consider how this film played out in its first 2/3s of running time.
Both films begin with a late night arrival for a family vacation spot. Here, Paddy (James McAvoy), Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their son Ant (Dan Hough) arrive at a secluded Italian resort, and immediately, there’s a lot of disruption to the seemingly relaxed tone of the vacation. But, gradually, the Dalton family (including husband Ben (Scoot McNairy), wife Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler)) and they spend more time together, and resolve to keep in touch. The Daltons are an American family that is living in London, and we get the impression their life hasn’t been the same since the move. A bit after the vacation in Italy, they get an invitation to visit Paddy and Ciara at their isolated Scottish home. As the week goes on, the thin veil of appeal Paddy and his family had wears off, and the Dalton family finds something insidious being the case with them.
If you’ve watched the original film, many of the most effective beats from that film are adapted in ways that keep an audience on their toes. I like the way Ben and Louise’s marital troubles are utilized to ratchet up the tension in the film, how Paddy and Ciara’s overbearing behavior gets under the Daltons’s skin, and how intimacy and power dynamics are utilized to turn the screws of suspense. I also like how Watkins leans more into the dark comedy of the narrative, at times, rather than simply being a horror film. One of the strongest changes to the story are the children’s parts to play in it. There is more agency to Ant and Agnes in this film that I thought served the narrative well, and they are terrific child performances that bounce off of the adults well.
As long-time readers know, my favorite horror film in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” One of the chief complaints of that film is that, because it’s Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrence, we know he’s going to go nuts, and he kind of starts early. I think that might be a more apt criticism of McAvoy in this film. While a terrific actor, and he has wonderful moments where he turns on the charm to goad certain people into certain behavior, based solely on his work in Shyamalan’s “Split,” it’s obvious from the outset that we should not trust this character. And if you think Nicholson goes over the top in “The Shining,” I think McAvoy takes it to an insane degree in the third act that is just one of the reasons “Speak No Evil” just fell flat on its face for me.
McAvoy isn’t the only reason that “Speak No Evil” left me feeling uneasy about Watkins’s adaptation of the original film. While the father in the original makes several awful choices, Ben here is almost neutered to the point of incompetence. The use of different languages was a fundamental strength of Tafdrup’s movie, with English as a common tongue, and each family speaking to one another in their separate languages, making communication an important idea in the film; with everyone speaking English, the film just loses an extra layer of suspense. Ultimately, however, it comes down to the ending. There had to have been a better way to get to the ending this film gets to without being so out of control and unserious. It’s a shame Watkins was unable to find it.
