As someone who (depending on how charitable you’re feeling) could be described as either a tad deferential, perhaps too meek for their own good, or downright obsequious, 2022’s Speak No Evil went very close to the bone.
You see, I’m the type of person whose default state of being is “reflexively apologetic” — often begging forgiveness for the sin of daring to exist in somebody else’s periphery — and I have a tendency to blurt out the word “sorry” like it’s a nervous tic. It doesn’t matter if I’m clearly the aggrieved party in a situation; assuming any & all blame just seems like the done thing.
I really am that conflict-averse, and will bend over backwards to placate others if I think it will minimize the risk of me being exposed to the mildest of disagreements. Which I am assured is a very attractive quality by the way; right next to my disarming ability to correct people when they misquote famous movies.
If you’ll pardon me using a questionable phrase (and believe me, I’m always eager to be pardoned for something), I am what some corners of the internet would deem a “Beta.” And given that I am forever cursed to be this way, Speak No Evil at times felt like a direct attack on my character.
Indeed, I found its absurdly polite protagonists — enduring the weekend from hell with phony smiles plastered on their faces — almost too relatable to bear. Bjørn and Louise are both so terrified of causing offense that they’re willing to overlook murderous red flag after murderous red flag when it comes to their blatantly sinister hosts.
Resigning themselves to certain doom — because it’s preferable to having an awkward conversation about boundaries — the couple are trapped in a scenario that I could easily envision myself caught up in. As their tormentors continue to push the limits of acceptable behavior, and the mounting infractions escalate from (semi-excusable) microaggressions to acts of unfiltered hostility, these submissive leads never once retaliate. So preoccupied are they with being the perfect, courteous guests that they just sit there and take it.
Of course, this is the entire thesis of the film. That our need to save face will often trump reason and that such excessive civility can be weaponized against us by those who are less concerned with appearances. It’s a brutally nihilistic story about how the vast majority of people will allow themselves to be walked all over because taking a stand is just too hard. It might take that idea to a startling extreme — and I personally hope I’d have more cojones than the timid Bjørn if I was in his shoes — but it still felt very plausible to me. As did that traumatic ending.
An Unlikely Fit For Hollywood
‘Speak No Evil’ (2022)
From the aging of biological cells to the eventual death of a supergiant star, some things in this universe are just inevitable. Like with those scientific certainties, it’s only a matter of time before an acclaimed international chiller is sucked up into the Hollywood remake machine for a quick translation job.
Whether it’s Silent House getting a perfectly redundant update (for people who can’t get past the “one-inch barrier” of subtitles), every single J-horror film under the sun being Americanised in the early 2000s, or Quarantine somehow copying [REC] beat for beat and yet simultaneously paling in comparison; it’s something we cinephiles have come to tolerate. As long as you keep in mind that those originals still exist, there’s no real harm done. Hell, if you’re lucky, you might even get a Let Me In or The Ring out of it.
That being said, I’ll admit that I did balk at the notion of Speak No Evil — of all films — getting an English language do-over. Especially when I found out that the audience-friendly Blumhouse would be overseeing production. It just didn’t feel like an obvious candidate for a US remake. First and foremost, barely any of it is subtitled anyway; with the Danish & Dutch characters only using their native tongues when they’re being cagey,and otherwise communicating through a shared understanding of English.
Plus, there are all of the ways that the Tafdrup brothers’ screenplay actively resists Hollywood-ification. It’s an agonizing slow burn (with nothing much happening until the final 10 minutes), the main protagonists are unusually passive (in a way that makes them difficult to root for), young children are victimized throughout, there’s no cathartic showdown between hero & villain, and it ends on a profoundly miserable gut punch that you cannot imagine going down well with focus groups.
Short of fundamentally changing its narrative and central theme, there’s no way of making this work as a mainstream crowd-pleaser. You’d be better off making a feel good-version of Martyrs or, I dunno, Eden Lake.
Shot For Shot (Until It’s Not)
‘Speak No Evil’ (2024)
Which is why it was intriguing to then discover that the director of the latter movie — an unrelentingly mean-spirited and bleak UK thriller — was going to be helming the new Speak No Evil.
Having also worked on Black Mirror and My Little Eye, James Watkins is a filmmaker who knows a thing or two about downer endings and he isn’t too coy about offing young kids either (see The Woman in Black). With him being attached, I was hopeful that this could be that rare English language remake that doesn’t sanitize things or dumb them down for the sake of broad appeal.
And to be fair, that’s kind of what we got here. Speak No Evil (2024) largely retains what made its predecessor compelling; featuring the same unsettling antagonists, the same oppressive vibe, and the same queasy subject matter. At least that’s the case up until a very clear departure point near the beginning of the 3rd act, but we’ll get to that later.
Before we can discuss how the climax has been altered here, and what that ultimately means for the film’s thematic ideas, we’ll first need to explore just how close this remake hews to its source material to begin with. If it’s not obvious, please note that heavy spoilers will follow.
Like the Danish original, Blumhouse’s iteration follows a spousal duo — Bjørn now given the anglicized name of “Ben,” and the family unit going by “The Daltons” — who have a pleasant enough yet rather mundane life together. When holidaying abroad in Italy, they meet a free-spirited British couple, Paddy & Ciara, and the four soon become fast friends.
Although they have very little in common, there’s something about these strangers that’s alluring to Ben and Louise. They’re charismatic, funny, way more exciting than anybody else they know, and it doesn’t hurt either that they have a young boy who is roughly the same age as their own daughter: Agnes.
Infatuated with this new relationship, and acting on a complete whim, the Dalton clan ends up accepting an invitation to spend a couple of days at Paddy & Ciara’s farmhouse (here relocated from the rural Netherlands to the West Country). Initially, it’s shaping up to be a nice getaway for the city-slickers, but they do start to wonder if they’ve made a mistake once their hosts begin showing their true colors. Paddy reveals himself to have a mercurial temper, for example, while Ciara brazenly crosses the line in scolding Agnes, and they’re both pretty neglectful of their son Ant as well.
However, not wanting to create a fuss, Ben & Louise resolve to simply let all of these transgressions slide; a move that the antagonistic couple appears to take as a direct challenge. Indeed, their torments only get worse from there, with Paddy & Ciara pushing the microaggressions as far as they possibly can until the Daltons reach the edge of their manners.
And it’s here that the original Speak No Evil and Watkin’s adaptation definitively part ways. In the Danish telling, neither Bjørn nor Louise ever hit that politeness breaking point. Sure, they’re given ample reason — and ample opportunity — to nip it all in the bud, but the closest they ever get to standing up for themselves is when they attempt to sneak out in the early hours of the morning. And even then, they quickly return with their tails between their legs.
You get the impression that there is nothing the other family could do to nudge the Danish Daltons into fighting back. In fact, they’re so accommodating of their killers that, when driving them to the fucking execution site, Patrick (Paddy’s Dutch equivalent) tauntingly gets out of his car to take a whiz and leaves his keys in the ignition! Because he knows that Bjørn won’t seize that opportunity to escape. And guess what: he’s absolutely correct. It’s a staggering failure from the spinless patriarch; one which not only damns himself but also his wife and daughter.
Right up until the very end, the Danish Daltons are complying with their murderers’ every last demand; giving up Agnes, stripping naked in a quarry, and standing precisely where they’re told so they can be stoned to death. All without putting up a struggle.
Conversely, their American counterparts are like: “fuck that shit!” from the second they cotton on to Paddy & Ciara’s plan; their self-preservation instincts kicking in long before they ever get to that remote slaughtering ground. Indeed, by the time Mackenzie Davis has armed herself with a box cutter — something which would be unthinkable in the original — you know we’re going down a very different road here. One that altogether alters the message of the film.
A Guns Blazing Finale
‘Speak No Evil’ (2024)
If See No Evil (2022) is all about inaction, then it’s kind of odd for the remake to go full Straw Dogs; having its protagonists lob Molotov cocktails around and braining people with hammers. That’s not meant as a value judgement by the way. I’m not knocking it, I just find it fascinating that the two movies deviate this sharply towards the end, after being so in tune up until then.
For those who’ve already experienced this story once before, you’re liable to feel a profound sense of déjà vu during the first hour or so of Blumhouse’s update. The dialogue is seldom changed from the original and many of the scenes are near-identical in terms of blocking. Even the new location (over 300 miles away from the Netherlands) kind of looks the same if you squint.
The resemblance is so uncanny that it’s tough not to hyper-fixate on every microscopic tweak, like you’re doing a spot-the-difference puzzle. I couldn’t help but wonder, for instance, why Agnes was eager to go on a swing this time around instead of a slide, or why the boar that Paddy serves to the vegetarian Louise had been swapped out for a goose. These changes might be trivial and wouldn’t phase me at all, were it not for the fact that everything else has been so slavishly reconstructed here. When I’m trying to recall if the shed was on the other side of the farmhouse before, you know they’ve been pretty faithful to the source material.
Which makes it all the more interesting that the final act takes such a radical turn into conventional siege movie territory. It’s like it becomes a speculative What If…? take on Speak No Evil; imaging a more upbeat version of events where Bjørn isn’t a total pushover and man’s inhumanity to man can be overcome through sheer brute force alone.
If you think about it, it’s almost antithetical to what the Tafdrups were trying to convey in their film. Their whole deal was a belief that the strong will always take advantage of the weak and that societal pressure to be courteous often keeps us from acting in our own best interest. The Hollywoodized ending of the US remake, on the other hand, celebrates its heroes triumphing over the bad guy through retributive violence.
But it’s also more than that. Watkins is no hack and has proven himself to be a contemplative filmmaker in the past. I’m therefore not convinced that he signed onto this project for a mere paycheque, nor that he would be content to water down all of the original’s thematic depth.
Rejecting a Toxic World View
‘Speak No Evil’ (2024)
Admittedly, some concessions have been made for a mainstream audience here. Agnes is aged up a bit (so that we don’t have to watch a literal toddler in peril), there’s a clunky bit of over-exposition to clarify the villains’ motives, and we naturally have to indulge at least one fiery explosion.
Still, I think the remake is more than just empty calories and that it has something unique to say; specifically in relation to the characters of Ben and Paddy. You see, Ben’s mediocrity has been cranked up a notch in Speak No Evil (2024). Not only is he unassertive and physically puny like before but, on top of that, he’s now also an unemployed, sexually frustrated cuckold.
Unsurprisingly, he feels quite inadequate about this and that’s part of the reason he’s so drawn to Paddy upon their first meeting. A considerably more masculine specimen — boasting a muscular physique and supreme confidence levels — he represents everything that Ben wishes he could be. The two even have a kind of mentor-pupil dynamic for a brief stint, with Paddy acting as a Tyler-Durden (by way of Andrew Tate) figure.
Imparting toxic wisdom on every subject from how to deal with cheating partners to the importance of embracing your primal rage; he’s a bad influence on Ben for sure. Heck, his idea of a healthy bonding activity between friends is to go out and shoot a defenseless animal together.
In essence, Paddy’s crude philosophy boils down to “a real man takes what he wants and bends others to his will”; a mantra that’s reflected in his parenting style, his relationship with nature, and his confrontational attitude towards the Daltons. It’s also the root of his eventual downfall when it does come, as those that he’s so gleefully preyed on decide “enough is enough” and reject all this alpha male posturing.
For his part, Ben even refuses to pull the trigger on a defeated Paddy when given the chance and, in sharp contrast to the original’s fateful car key scene, this isn’t a moment of pathetic inaction. Rather, it’s a moment of defiance and strength. It’s him showing that he’s better than his foe and that he refutes everything he stands for.
Granted, this is then followed by a 12-year-old boy stepping in to finish the job (possibly indicating that Paddy has passed some of his rotten values down to Ant) but, nevertheless, it’s a much more hopeful conclusion to the story. One in which we not only see the villain getting his comeuppance, but also his moral code being thoroughly dismissed.
If, like me, you found the leads’ inability to stand up for themselves horribly relatable last time around, that’s quite a comforting twist. And an unexpected one too, especially coming from the guy who made Eden Lake.
Speak No Evil (2024) is now available on Digital outlets.
