What made Christian Tafdrup’s Danish nihilistic horror film “Speak No Evil” — an even more hopeless take on “Funny Games” and its vivisection of bourgeois manners and cruel whetting of audience appetite for carnage — so shocking was what wasn’t spoken. Namely, the Nordic social code that says you should never enter a stranger’s home especially when anxiously invited, and that the invitation alone should be a flashing red light to avoid mingling your family vacation with another’s. As American studios are almost perversely compelled to do, here “Speak No Evil” gets a safe, devoid-of-scares remake directed by James Watkins, hailing from the Blumhouse factory of mainstream scares. Watkins is an appropriate match for a remake, if it had to happen at all, given his pedigree as the director of the chilling “Eden Lake,” about a romantic weekend terrorized by delinquents without a clear motive.
But this version of “Speak No Evil,” despite an effectively creepy performance from James McAvoy, grinds the unsettling contours of the original into gory, “Straw Dogs”-lite, home-invasion comeuppance pulp in a last act that’s exactly the sort of dragged-out predictable material Tafdrup sought to avoid. Even a captivatingly unnerved Mackenzie Davis, here married to a feckless shell of a man played by Scoot McNairy, and the commanding “The Nightingale” actress Aisling Franciosi in her first major studio turn, can’t rescue this “Speak No Evil” from its own impulse toward placating the audience with a happy-ish ending that’s a far cry from the stones thrown in the final, harrowingly deflating scene of the original.
Posh, London-dwelling Americans Louise (Davis) and Ben (McNairy) are on a Tuscan summer holiday with their small daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler), reeling from Louise’s recent infidelity and from Ben recently losing his job, emasculating him from the get-go in a movie that only continues to do so (much like the original). It’s there they meet unhinged English West Country vacationers Paddy (McAvoy) and Ciara (Franciosi), a PDA-happy couple also traveling with their kid, Ant (Dan Hough), and it’s Paddy’s brazen dragging of a lounge chair along the poolside that introduces a man with a crass relationship to hotel manners. But the couples bond well enough despite some ominous early cues about Paddy and Ciara (including a disgusting crack about toilet paper habits Paddy makes to ward off another vacationing family from joining their table), and soon Louise and Ben are invited to their English countryside home for a follow-up vacation. What could go wrong?
Everything and then some, as after a pitch-black snaking drive to Paddy and Ciara’s off-the-grid, working-class cottage home, Paddy is soon forcing game into the mouth of a devoutly (but perhaps hypocritically) vegetarian Louise. Watkins, who also wrote the script, lifts such faux-pas interactions directly from Tafdrup’s film — while leaving out the really creepy stuff like the Paddy of the original, there called Patrick, helping himself to a piss in the guest bathroom while Louise is taking a shower. Or the Danish couple in the 2022 film getting so turned on, whether they know it or not, by their hosts’ lack of shame that they end up having sex in the guest room with Patrick watching from a cutout window in the door. All Tafdrup’s kinks are ironed down to make this “Speak No Evil” presumably more palatable for popcorn-chomping moviegoers in the United States.
Though preserved, here, are the moments where you want to scream at the screen and shake Louise and Ben out of their passive stupor as Paddy and Ciara’s behavior gets stranger and more insidious, and Louise and Ben just sit there and take it. Both “Speak No Evil” films are sharpest in their inquiry into how we prostrate ourselves to avoid conflict, debasing our values in the process. Both films stretch credibility in terms of just how stupid these people can get — including Louise and Ben getting so freaked out they speed away from the country house in their Tesla, only to careen back to retrieve their daughter’s forgotten stuffed animal, thereby resealing themselves back into the tomb of eventual hell.
If you’ve seen the first “Speak No Evil,” there’s really no need to seek out this one. The best horror remakes enhance or augment their source material (see Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria,” for one), finding new crumbs under the carpet previously unexplored or only dusted up in passing by the original. Watkins’ remake unforgivably lifts directly from the original while leaving out a lot of the strong stuff, including the awful inevitability Tafdrup set up as the hosts turn out to be marauders with a murderous secret.
Even worse, if you’ve seen the lengthy trailer for this “Speak No Evil,” which has been preempting genre movies in theaters all summer, then there’s really no need to show up this time. The first footage even goes so far as to reveal the sinister, body-horror reality of Ant’s medical “condition,” an inability to speak that his parents ascribe to an undeveloped tongue. As predictable as such turns in the Danish movie were, Tafdrup still left you totally unprepared for his movie’s heartless and even blackly comic finale, sending you home with both a chill and a shrug. Though Watkins’ film limps toward its own grave in a flashy final act, I’ll at least give his film credit for its almost total lack of a score in the last 30 minutes, leaving you on uneasy ground about where things are going. But too bad you already know, and it’s too late to care.
In the American remake tradition, Watkins goes for a quote-unquote happier ending than Tafdrup did, one that finds Louise and Ben facing off in an overlong set piece against their hosts, while trying to prevent the premeditated family annihilation they walked right into. Davis, the Canadian indie film and TV actress beloved for her role in AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire” and superbly menacing in Sophia Takal’s industry psycho-thriller “Always Shine,” does her best in a role that’s mostly a chess piece to move the plot machinations forward.
Same goes for McNairy, a helpless, spineless sad sack of a father who leaves his wife to take charge of the situation (and Davis is plenty game) as Paddy and Ciara turn full-blown evil. McAvoy’s gift for a rictus grin and a swaggering machismo that eases you into feeling comfortable, only to twist on a 180 into pure psychopathy, is well-played here. But he’s more cartoonishly evil toxic male than the often-unreadable enigma actor Fedja van Huêt conjured in the 2022 film — especially when he’s screaming in Ant’s face about his poor dancing skills.
Why are Paddy and Ciara doing this? “Because you let us,” they tell Louise and Ben in a direct-quote callback to Tafdrup’s film. But then Paddy keeps talking and overexplaining the root of his and Ciara’s reign of terror where Tafdrup just dropped off, here a byproduct of a screenplay that makes too many excuses and spells out too much where Tafdrup let the horrifying events unfold with no asterisks or hand-holding into the abyss. Even earlier, McAvoy recites Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” — about how they fuck you up, your mum and dad — in another blunting diatribe that speaks loudly of the movie’s thematic intentions. Blumhouse has inadvertently reiterated the argument for these horror remakes to not exist at all — instead of speaking no evil, “Speak No Evil” ends up speaking only the case for its own demise. The company is about to reboot “The Blair Witch Project” for Lionsgate. Please, god, make it end.
Grade: C-
“Speak No Evil” premieres in U.S. theaters on Friday, September 13.
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