Director/Screenplay – James Watkins, Based on the Film Speak No Evil (2022) by Christian Tafdrup & Mad Tafdrup, Producers – Jason Blum & Paul Ritchie, Photography – Tim Maurice Jones, Music – Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans, Visual Effects – Outpost VFX (Supervisor – Robin Lamontagne), Special Effects Supervisor – Neal Champion, Makeup Design – Nicole Stafford, Production Design – James Price. Production Company – Blumhouse.
Cast
James McAvoy (Paddy Field), Mackenzie Davis (Louise Dalton), Scott McNairy (Ben Dalton), Aisling Franciosi (Ciara Field), Alix West Lefler (Agnes Dalton), Dan Hough (Ant), Jakob Højley Jørgensen (Torsten), Kris Hitchen (Mike), Motaz Mahlees (Muhjid)
Plot
Husband and wife Ben and Louise Dalton and their eleven-year-old daughter Agnes, Americans living in England, are in Italy on vacation. There they meet a vacationing British couple Paddy and Ciara Field and make friends, while Agnes connects with the Fields’ son Ant. Back in England, they receive a letter from the Fields asking them to come and visit their home in Dorset. They travel to the Fields’ country home. As they settle in, they find the behaviour of the Fields to step way over polite social boundaries. Beneath the facade of a regular family, they discover that disturbing things lurk, which serve to bring out tensions in their own marriage.
Speak No Evil (2022) was a film from Danish director Christian Tafdrup. Tafdrup based it on a couple he had encountered while on vacation who sent them a letter inviting them to come and visit. He never took up the offer but based the film on his worst possible imaginings of the scenario. Speak No Evil gained a great deal of word of mouth on the festival circuit. It was not so much a horror film but one about social boundaries and people who do not respect them, although it did reach an ending that definitely stepped over into horror. This is an English-language remake from Blumhouse. (See below for Blumhouse’s other films).
James Watkins is a British director who emerged with a number of genre scripts including those for My Little Eye (2002), Gone (2006) and The Descent: Part 2 (2009), before making his directorial debut with the strong Backwoods Brutality film Eden Lake (2008). He subsequently went on to the reasonable hit of the ghost story The Woman in Black (2012) for the revived Hammer Films, followed by the tv remake of The Ipcress File (2022).
Blumhouse has not had a very good relationship when it comes to conducting remakes – look no further than the atrocious English-language adaptation they conducted of Martyrs (2015), the live-action remake of tv’s Jem and the Holograms (2015), the painfully misandrist reworking of Black Christmas (2019) and the abysmal new version of Stephen King’s Firestarter (2022). Their revivals of pre-existing franchises such as Halloween (2018), The Craft: Legacy (2020) and The Exorcist: Believer (2023) are shameful in comparison to their originals. As a result, I held no particularly high aspirations for their version of Speak No Evil.
The hosts – James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi
James Watkins repeats familiar scenes from the original but often changes them in ways that don’t seem to add much to a scene. For instance, the scene where the two kids dance is repeated using the song Cotton-Eye Joe (1994) and takes place at an outdoor table but the scene gets dragged out through multiple stops and restarts, with Alix West Lefler even walking off twice – not to mention so many repetitions of a song that I hated when I first heard it on the radio that I was wanting to scream at Watkins to end the scene. We get a repeat of the scene driving off to dinner where the music in the car is turned up loud, but here it is blown up into a sequence where McAvoy is also driving wildly down a single-lane country road. There’s a repeat of the scene where McAvoy’s husband drops the jolt reveal where he says he isn’t really a doctor, but here this is weakened by him immediately after saying he was just kidding.
We get a repeat of the scene where James McAvoy makes Mackenzie Davis’s wife eat meat, but this is followed up by later scenes where McAvoy sits at the restaurant table and seems to launch into an ideological attack on Mackenzie’s vegetarianism, as well as later scenes where their critique of parenting methods is turned back on them. In fact, the remake now even has a subtext about McAvoy representing uncouth rural values and where Scott McNairy and in particular Mackenzie Davis represent liberal values under attack. We even get utterly random monologues with James McAvoy going on about the proper use of toilet paper.
The problem with James Watkins is that he seems to want to make this version of Speak No Evil be about other things than the original’s plot about a regular couple and the strange hosts. While the basics of the original form the backbone of the remake, Scott McNairy and Mackenzie Davis’s husband and wife are also rewritten as a couple experiencing marital problems. Quite a bit is given over to this as though Watkins had some personal axe to grind but it adds nothing to the story except to make McNairy and Davis’s couple so dysfunctional as to no longer be sympathetic leads. There is one scene right near the end where they are about to make an escape and Mackenzie Davis stops in the middle of doing so to in effect thank James McAvoy for helping highlight the problems in their marriage and showing that it is impossible for the two of them to keep on going. It is a scene that feels as though it has strayed in from another film altogether, not to mention it seems an absurd pause to have such a scene at a point when they are meant to be escaping for their lives.
The guests – (l to r) daughter Alix West Lefler, wife Mackenzie Davis and husband Scott McNairy
What works much better in this version is the scenes between the son Dan Hough and daughter Alix West Lefler, which are expanded out with more in the way of classic suspense-driving tactics such as the stealing of the keys and venture down into the cellar in the barn and the son trying to mutely point out the connections between the couples and children in the photos. Watkins also extends the film out past the grim ending that Christian Tafdrup gave us in the original. This aims for much more of a standard US thriller resolution with McNairy and Davis trying to make an escape from the farm, before being recaptured and tortured by McAvoy and a climax fighting around and even setting the farmhouse on fire. It just seemed to have a lot more effect when it came to the brutal abruptness of the ending of the first film, even if it was one that left you with a lot more questions.
