‘Speak No Evil’ Review: Blumhouse’s Gutless, and Un-Scary, Remake of a Danish Shocker

A grimly amusing skewering of Scandi politesse with a knife-in-the-gut finale in the vein of Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 shocker Speak No Evil grew in reputation through word of mouth for its slow-burning displeasures and uncompromising cruelty. Those are features that are largely absent from James Watkins’s remake, a hollow attempt to turn a provocative showpiece into a crowd-pleaser that makes you wonder if the filmmakers are actively disdainful of the original.

Uptight Americans Ben and Louise Dalton (Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis) are vacationing in Italy with their young daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), when they cross paths with Ciara and Paddy (Aisling Franciosi and James McAvoy), another couple on holiday with their developmentally challenged son, Ant (Dan Hough). The parents strike up a fast friendship, so it comes as no surprise that, upon returning to their home in London, Ben and Louise receive an invitation from Paddy to visit the family at their farm in the British countryside.

As soon as they arrive, things feel off almost immediately, with Paddy seeming to test the limits of Ben and Louise’s comfort at every turn, from pressuring the vegetarian Louise to taste the farm’s prize goose to disciplining Agnes as if she were his own child. Alarm bells ringing, Ben and Louise’s personal conflicts keep them from making the wise decision to leave as Ant brings Agnes closer and closer to uncovering the dark secret that the home hides.

The greatest strength of Tafdrup’s film is its elusiveness, with every interaction between the two couples animated by a skittering unease whose roots you can’t quite trace. Here, McAvoy is a maniac from the jump. The actor is clearly having the time of his life as a jacked loose cannon, but he works overtime to carry the film’s messaging on toxic masculinity on his brawny shoulders. And where Tafdrup found tension in the cultural gulf between Danes and Dutchmen, the remake is more simplistically about the rural-versus-urban divide, with the milquetoast Ben seeming somewhat besotted with his macho granola homesteader host while also making a few puny efforts to grapple with American bugaboos like gun violence and sustainability.

Tafdrup’s film inspired titters of the nervy, knowing kind, born of a universal familiarity with being in an unpleasant situation but trying to save face. Conversely, this new Speak No Evil inspires the wrong kind of laughter, given its believability-straining need to over-explain why a couple makes the wrong decision time and again. This is made even worse by the expanded role that the child characters play in the narrative, constantly signposting that something is very wrong and effectively deflating any real mystery and tension from the proceedings.

The finale, though, is the biggest insult of all. Where the original has a stinger in its tail, this Speak No Evil gutlessly takes the story in a completely new direction, and it’s bound to infuriate everyone but fans of the most paint-by-numbers, morally unambiguous genre cinema. Hyperconscious of its characters’ motivations and scrubbed of cultural specificity, this remake fills the vacuum with pop psychology and easy thrills that have a dispiritingly flattening effect.