“Speak No Evil” (2024) Review

I am afraid that I must become “that guy” and decry that this American remake is not as good as its Danish source material. That might not seem fair to this strictly-English language version of Speak No Evil, but it’s impossible to shake the night and day comparisons. The original 2022 Danish film felt like a brutal and gruesome psychological exploration of family and passive-aggressive relationships. The 2024 remake treats this material more like a rollercoaster ride, bound for more laughs than shock.

Rather than rely on a slow-burn of horror, here’s a film that casts James McAvoy to pump steroids into this story. He plays the role of Paddy, an eccentric father to his mostly-mute boy Ant (Dan Hough) and his loving wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi). They become the highlight of a vacation for the troubled Dalton family, comprised of the bitter husband Ben (Scoot McNairy), the uncomfortable wife Louise (Mackenzie Davis), and anxiety-riddled daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler). The original Danish film posed the troubled family as being easily charmed by the casual pleasantries of the other family. This version, however, crafts Paddy’s family to seem so loud and boisterous that going along with them seems less out of fun and more out of surface-level fear about what will happen if you tell them no.

This film seems to be in a hurry for a film that runs ten minutes longer than the original. There’s rarely a moment to let the tension boil, as McAvoy’s constant grin coats every scene with unease. He’s so vibrant with his mannerisms that the fear takes hold fast whenever there’s a brief pause or lull in the conversation. It doesn’t help that Paddy continuously teases this aspect with his constant joking about the lies for why he invited the Daltons out to his remote estate for a vacation. Of course, the film does reveal he has sinister intentions, but this script keeps mounting his fake-out pranks to the point where you just want to scream at the screen “Will you just start slaughtering the family already!”

So much of the film focuses on teasing the audience with the obvious, turning the suspicious less chilling and more like a game. It might as well be considering how little time the film has to embrace any of the original cerebral nature. The strained relationship between Ben and Louise is given an air of bluntness that robs the film of a deeper contemplation on why marriages crumble amid the crowding factors of career, sex, and social personalities. Even Paddy’s ultimate intentions of slaughtering parents and adopting the orphans are given an excuse far too neat and simplistic to be compelling beyond the mechanics of his house of pain. Some of the original film’s tension is there and I’m sure it will delight audiences, but more in the same way that Hershey’s chocolate tastes like Godiva chocolate.

By the third act, the film gives up on everything. It stops playing up the psychological elements and trades all that in for a trapped-in-the-house action-thriller, where Ben and Louise must transform into action heroes that can wield guns and hammers. It forgoes any of the more cerebral moments of sex and violence, treating the more primal elements of the original film as being too icky for mainstream audiences. There are a lot familiar scenes from the original, but the ones that hammer home the themes, ranging from the voyeur during sex to the gritty snipping of a tongue, are pruned for the prudish. By the time that film got its ending, it didn’t surprise me that a safer, happier ending was favored. This grim cautionary tale of accepting pushy friends veers hard into the lane of crowd-pleaser horror, blowing out all its themes as it speeds towards an ending devoid of deeper meaning and more popcorn-fueled appeasement.

Speak No Evil says little when compared to its superior original, which wasn’t afraid to shout. So much of the film has been softened on a thematic and gritty level that the two films feel like entirely different genres. Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil was a visceral experience meant to disturb and fascinate with its stellar psychological staging. Blumhouse’s Speak No Evil was built for an audience to holler back at the screen, shouting for characters not to go in a room or clapping when one of the victims kills their attackers with a blunt object. Even McAvoy’s marvelous performance can’t fully rescue this film from feeling like it’s been hallowed out of a more visceral experience, crafting a picture where McAvoy may be eating the scenery, but I’m still feeling hungry for a better film.