Remakes are difficult, especially so when Hollywood decides to remake a well-regarded international film for an English-speaking audience. For every great example like True Lies, The Birdcage, The Ring, The Departed, Let Me In, and CODA, we have The Vanishing, Vanilla Sky, The Grudge, Quarantine, Oldboy, and Downhill. Those in the latter may not always be especially awful, but they often fail to make a case for their reason to exist, and such is the case for this year’s Speak No Evil.
Speak No Evil is a remake of the 2022 Danish/Dutch horror film by Christian and Mark Tafdrup, now written and directed by James Watkins. Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy star as Louise and Ben Dalton, an American couple holidaying in Italy with their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler). The family meets then befriends the free-spirited and larger-than-life Paddy (James McAvoy), his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their mute son Ant (Dan Hough), who in their vacation friends bliss invite the Daltons to stay at their secluded and rustic West Country farm to “get away from it all”.
It’s important to note that Louise and Ben are not living in married bliss. Louise gives in too much to Agnes’ emotional insecurities around a stuffed animal, while Ben feels emasculated by workplace struggles and a possible affair by Louise. The West Country getaway ends up being the perfect opportunity for the family to get back to some sense of stability and peace. How wrong they’ll be.
The original film was based in the kind of stark differences in European cultures that cannot be overcome. The Danish say and do and eat different things to the Dutch, and when you’re guests for such generous and friendly strangers, you put up with far too much than normal. Christian Tafdrup’s film sits in a kind of creeping discomfort for most of the runtime, the audience never really knowing what is happening, why the host family is so strange, or if the guest family is really looking too far into things. Ultimately, this is all a misanthropic nightmare that feels primal, rotten, and disturbing. It’s a brilliant horror experience for those that have the stomach.
Whenever James Watkins’ remake treads the same ground as the original, it’s a fun time. We have the same scenario of a secluded farmhouse that promises rustic getaway but is really a gross hovel; the daughter is made to sleep on a small mattress on the floor of the son’s bedroom; the parents bedsheets are stained; the host couple insists on eating meat even when their guests are vegetarian; a double date night to a local restaurant evolves into an awkward bombardment of sex and loud music. It’s all a polite person’s nightmare when you think you’re on board for a nice holiday to the countryside.
Where the remake falls down is in its total abandonment of subtlety. James McAvoy cuts a dominating and disturbing presence as Paddy, a man clearly inspired by modern alpha male psychology and physicality, with his bulging trap muscles and politically incorrect humour. But Paddy is less a charming mountain man and more like an obvious villain ripped from an M. Night Shyamalan thriller (yes, the Split comparison is apt). McAvoy’s performance is fun, but Watkins’ direction never allows for a real moment where we might actually understand his character and why he acts like he does. Sure, we get the obvious trauma backstory, but it never feels real or grounded. McAvoy is playing this like a tounge-in-cheek camp thriller, but Watkins is making a generic Blumhouse thriller.
Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy together is cause for celebration for the few but proud Halt and Catch Fire fans, and they are enjoyable playing husband and wife who are one argument away from divorce, but they’re burdened by a leaden script that never allows for believable or interesting character development. Aisling Franciosi, the incomparable star of Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale, is wasted here in a role overshadowed by McAvoy’s larger-than-life presence and resulting in a sub-par secondary villain.
Speak No Evil might honestly work best if one goes in blind, having never seen the original film and expecting just a straight-up psychothriller. On that level, it works, but with prior experience with the original film, one can see the cracks and seems. As I said, most of the good twists and turns of the movie are just beat-for-beat from the original, but the total change to the ending into a by-the-number thriller I’ve seen countless times before just felt wrong. This ending change felt lazy, cowardly, and disappointingly dumb, with our calculating and one-step-ahead villains reduced to bumbling morons like the Wet Bandits in Home Alone. Speak No Evil is perfectly watchable, but still has no reason to exist. Watch the original instead, if you’ve got the nerve.
