The ambition of James Watkins’ Speak No Evil seems to be a combination of Sam Peckinpah’s controversial classic, Straw Dogs, and Ari Aster’s recent masterwork, Midsommar… but with kids added.
The problem is, ultimately, that it’s not quite brave enough to be either film.
Worse, it is closely based on the 2022 Danish film by Christian Tafdrup, also called Speak No Evil. And that film has the horrifying roots that connect to those other films, not just in a dramatically different 3rd act, but within scene after scene, in which events and dialogue are almost wholly lifted by the new film.
I watched the Dutch film, available on AMC+, after seeing the new Blumhouse film. One of the odd experiences is one sequence in which I felt, watching the new film, was begging to include sex between the visiting couple, likely being watched by the guy whose home they are in. It didn’t happen in this movie. It turned out to be exactly what happens in the Dutch version. One of too many examples of pulling its punches.
As I feel I always must say when writing about sex and film, it’s not that the new film needed nudity or sex to be better. But what the sex does offer in the original is a look at the intimacy of those 2 characters, which informs the entire movie. (It also is a key story point that the new film just decides it doesn’t need.) The original, for instance, has a shower scene that the new film skips… but we don’t see any more than legs and shoulders. But we still engage her vulnerability in that moment.
And then there is the third act, which has been completely transformed… to the safer and more audience pleasing.
Still, this Speak No Evil is not a bad evening in the movie house. It has its moments and revels in the performances of James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy with good work from the other trio of actors who fill up 90% or more of the running time of the film.
But it keeps promising what it can not or will not deliver.
The trailer, which has run relentlessly for months, is effective in setting up the first 2 acts of the film. A family on some kind of vacation in the U.K. meets James McAvoy’s “local” family and is invited to come to McAvoy’s family home. Great. Everyone is open and fun and let’s see where it goes. But is McAvoy and his family crazy and dangerous? Unfortunately, the trailer gives away one of the twists in the story because it is an incredibly creepy moment of child abuse. But let’s put that aside.
McAvoy’s home, with his young wife (Aisling Franciosi) and silent son (Dan Hough), is a sign of movie trouble, as how we, as an audience, are meant to feel about it is oddly ambivalent. Is the house too expensive for this family to afford or is it a poorly kept shambles? I have, personally, tried to sleep in homes like this… so I get it… but the movie doesn’t do a very good job of clarifying the schizophrenic nature of the home, which seems to be a beautiful, funky location… but not well defined, whatever the director’s intention.
The sheets in the bed being, it seems, dirty, is the kind of thing that isn’t viewer-friendly, as we can’t really judge it easily. When the Mackenzie Davis character gets disgusted by something she sees, the film doesn’t show us what she sees. So I think the filmmaker wanted that lack of clarity… that we shouldn’t, in the 2nd act, be clear about whether our female lead is just uptight and overly demanding or if she really has something to be creeped out by. Fair enough.
But like other elements of this film, when it comes time for the ambiguousness to pay off, it really doesn’t. The third act solutions to the mysteries of the film are too banal to be a great pay off. (I won’t be spoiling them here.)
Straw Dogs combines the very real threat of The Locals, who are game to abuse The Outsiders in any way that their whims command, with the very real emotional pressures of the marriage on the two central characters, pressing hard on the personal paranoia of Dustin Hoffman’s David while positioning Susan George’s Amy as an archetype of female sexuality and objectification.
The element of sexual threat exists in Speak No Evil (2024), but never pays off in a direct way. And when it offers up some interesting ideas involving a woman other than Mackenzie Davis’ character, it doesn’t allow it to develop into something truly upsetting.
The strangers in a strange land element, central to Midsommar, is there when things go sideways. But again, where Midsommar ups the stakes as the story continues, Speak No Evil chooses (unlike the original) the most simplistic, uninteresting answers.
Again… it’s not like getting your nails pulled out. Good vs Evil is still fun. But the ambitions that keep being set up by the movie and which never get paid off are a terrible tease. And the solve for that, which is also not taken, might be to make the banality of the late twists the point of the overall film. But alas, no.
There is a point - perhaps the peak of the film - when it feels like the movie is about to become about putting the issue of wrapping our children in bubble wrap on trial. And that was surprising. Intriguing. But the film quickly scurries away from the gray and back to the simplicity of good vs evil, making the roles of all the players clear as day. Too clear.
There is another beat which the audience is completely with because it allows the audience to take a side on a (relatively) slow-developing choice made by the lead characters. But once again, the choice made is the kind Roger Ebert used to rail on about in thrillers, instead of trying something more complex (which might require more actors and another location).
As I watched the film, I thought about the Blumhouse budget… that this was an inexpensive film, limited to a cast of 6, with only McAvoy getting paid any real money. Everyone is good. Scoot McNairy actually has the most complex character to play… a real guy who has been a bit emasculated by his Type A wife, haunted by his weakness, but not enough to be strong. It’s nicely shot.
But the budget didn’t limit the script from being better. The problem I had with the movie is not one that feels like “the studio didn’t let them do X, Y or Z.” The third act is a choice by a writer/director. And it created enough snappy violence and threat to make a great trailer, which it did.
But then, you look at the original and you see what you were missing.
There was enough set up in this new film that there could have been a dozen alternate answers to the big questions of the film. I am not demanding any one or two or three or the choice made by the original film. I just wanted the payoff(s) to be a little more complex, a little more extreme, a little more memorable. And I should say, a little more realistic. At some point, the actions being taken on screen become a bit random and not quite as believable.
Speak No Evil could have been great. I didn’t hate it at all. But I really wanted that next gear. Really, really wanted. We have seen “this movie” so many times, at so many levels of success… or failure. The great progenitors that come to mind while watching it weren’t anymore expensive. They were just more mad, that madness carrying real human emotion. And that is what really sticks.
Perhaps you will look up the original to have a more horrifying, more emotionally challenging version of the same story.
Until tomorrow…
I never know.
Dutch or Danish?