Speak No Evil (2024) Movie Review

Christian Tafdrup’s “Speak No Evil” is, without question, one of the most insanely, insultingly idiotic horror films to make its mark in the 2020s. A film more focused on inanely mining your discomfort like a drunken prospector than actually doing anything with whatever he unearths, Tafdrup’s surface-level examination of social customs as a means of critiquing toxic politeness only served to reinforce how little he actually understood the tropes he was trying to subvert; it was essentially the exact film that people who misunderstood and hated “Funny Games” thought they’d be getting when they watched “Funny Games.” It only makes sense, then, that those at Blumhouse would double down on the Haneke slander and continue their misguided trip down the “Funny Games” path with an identical American remake, minus any of the Austrian auteur’s extra-textual justification.

At least, that’s what one would think. In reality, gone is Tafdrup in favor of “The Woman in Black” helmsman James Watkins, whose retooling of the Danish film manages an incredibly rare feat for a remake, particularly an American one of international production: 2024’s “Speak No Evil,” somehow, vastly improves upon its predecessor in nearly every conceivable way. Granted, that bar was scraping the ground so aggressively that it’s basically been whittled down to a sewing needle, but in an absolutely shocking turn of events, Watkins seems to understand that the language of this production wasn’t the only thing that needed a revamp if this Hollywood vehicle was going to take off.

It’s only natural that anyone with PTSD from two years ago may be skeptical of the faithfulness of Watkins’s vision at the start of the film, for “Speak No Evil” bears all the hallmarks of its blueprint’s setup with almost painful accuracy. Ben (Scoot McNairy; remember him?) and Louise (Mackenzie Davis) are a London-based American couple on vacation in Italy with their socially anxious daughter (Alix West Lefler, about as good as one might expect from a child star not given the Haneke treatment). On the trip, they hit it off with an eccentric Irish(?) couple (James McAvoy and Aisling Fanciosi) and their developmentally disabled son Ant (Dan Hough), whose shrunken tongue makes it difficult for him to communicate.

Speak No Evil (2024) Movie Review — A still from “Speak No Evil” (2024)

After striking their rapport, the American clan is invited by their new pals on a trip to their remote cottage, an offer that they take up against every shred of better judgment flowing through their veins to spend a weekend with a family they barely know. By all accounts, it’s an extremely irrational decision; Ben and Louise know it, you know it, and Watkins knows it. Regardless, the plans go through, and the incrementally unhinged behavior expressed by their host family makes these newcomers wary of precisely the sort of relaxing trip on which they’ve embarked.

Tafdrup also knew that this couple’s willingness to endure these affronts to good taste and personal boundaries beggared belief. Still, his vision attempted to turn that discomfort into a deathly serious nail-biter that loses all semblance of intrigue the second you start questioning anyone’s intelligence or the baffling tonal registers he aims for—which is to say, after roughly 15 minutes. Watkins, meanwhile, does a far better job because he understands a vital element of this story that his Danish antecedent did not. “Speak No Evil” doesn’t even remotely work as a Haneke-adjacent piece of social commentary horror; it does, however, work rather effectively as a feature-length Tim Robinson skit.

Playing up the foolishness of these characters’ tolerance levels and justifications for laughs is not only a borderline-brilliant way to distinguish “Speak No Evil” from its prior iteration, but it’s also just about the only way a film like this could work whatsoever. Treating these social faux-pas like the steps of an elaborate scheme from a couple who either wants to kill you or fuck you not only helps to mask the narrative absurdity in a veil of cheeky nonsense—it’s easier to forgive such foolish character decisions when you’re laughing so consistently—but it also manages to sell what little believability this dynamic establishes at all.

James McAvoy does most of the heavy lifting in this respect, as his teary-eyed performance is so constant in its grizzly sociability—his own social mask looking like he’s constantly out of breath or just gotten off the toilet, with a Jack Nicholson smile etched permanently between his tomato-red cheeks—that the endless onslaught of jokes actually makes his disarming disposition more plausible. The consistent output of dad jokes that veer into awkward farce make for a presence that at once feels welcoming and terrifying to cross; it makes sense why this couple might be enticed to spend time with him and his wife and why they might be too timid to speak up when they feel he’s out of line.

Where the new “Speak No Evil” opts to veer even further from Tafdrup’s version, however, is in its final act, a decision whose virtues may be more difficult to espouse. On the one hand, Tafdrup’s ending, like the rest of the film before it (or perhaps, because of the rest of the film before it), is a colossal culmination of bad will, an insulting slap in the face and kick in the balls to anyone who expected either satisfying thrills, pertinent commentary or competent filmmaking—again, essentially a Muppet Babies version of “Funny Games.” Watkins, meanwhile, opts towards a more populist ending that would normally signal the icing on the cake for an American remake too scared to challenge its audience, meek and unassertive in its desire to be anything more substantive than exactly the sort of film that the original “Speak No Evil” thinks it’s lambasting.

True as this decision may be to the established wisdom that American horror remakes don’t trust their viewers to embrace anything more challenging than “Joker,” this new chosen ending at least maintains a modicum of tension, derived from an interest in shifting those timid adherence to social customs into even the tiniest shred of situational awareness. The motivations become dumbed down beyond the point of acceptance—this is one area in which Christian Tafdrup admittedly kept his own film above water—but at this point, James Watkins clears the bar by merely being capable and consistent in his chosen style of cringe. Both versions of “Speak No Evil” see their tonal avenues through to the end, but only one of them seems to know just how mindless it actually is, making its choice to double down and dive head-first into the chicken coop at least marginally warranted.