Watered down horror: The American remake of ‘Speak No Evil’ wastes a sinister performance by James McAvoy

By Bob Grimm

While it boasts a fun, sinister performance from James McAvoy, Speak No Evil is yet another watered-down remake of a superior foreign film.

The 2022 Danish version of Speak No Evil stands as one of the most unrelentingly brutal horror films of the last 10 years—and it is completely different from the James Watkins-directed remake currently being unwrapped at local cinemas.

Both films feature a family being invited to another family’s home for a vacation break, and both families barely know each other, having just met. Both include a young boy who can’t speak, and a young girl with a stuffed-animal obsession. Finally, both versions have a sinister character who starts off all chummy and gradually becomes a monster.

While the Danish version offers the sort of twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan shit his pants, the American remake is more of a standard siege/hostage thriller, with few surprises and no commitment to its potentially nasty premise. It reminded me of the awful American remake of The Vanishing: The Dutch film had one of the scariest, most disturbing finales ever, while the remake was destroyed with a happy ending.

Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis play Ben and Louise Dalton, a vacationing couple who encounter Paddy (McAvoy) and his significant other, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), at the swimming pool. They hang out a few times, and eventually, an invitation is extended by Paddy for Ben and Louise to come visit in the countryside. The movie’s main lesson: Thou shalt not take thy family into the countryside after an invitation from strangers.

The visit starts innocently enough, but things start to get weird when Ant (Dan Hough), Paddy and Ciara’s son, seems to be attempting to alert the family to something. He can’t simply tell them what’s happening, because he has a malformed tongue. Slowly but surely, we start to find out that—surprise surprise!—Paddy and Ciara might not be as nice as they seem.

It’s always fun to watch McAvoy chew the scenery. His work here reminds me of his nasty turn in Split, another film where we got to see him play both mellow and crazy.

Sadly, McAvoy’s complex work is done in the service of a story that doesn’t get nearly dark enough. We just watch as some psycho guy and his accomplice try to do some bad stuff to an unsuspecting family, and the film devolves into an all-too-typical attempt-to-escape routine involving rooftops, ladders, staircases and flat tires. Not once during any of these set pieces does the film really establish a reason for being.

The movie looks good, and it has some decent work from Davis, although the usually reliable McNairy comes across as little too pathetic in ways that register as overacting. The so-called mystery of the movie is not as shocking as its makers seem to believe it is. In the original, that mystery was the setup for something completely hellish, and the end was a shotgun blast to the senses. As for the remake’s ending? It’s maudlin.

I hadn’t seen the original Speak No Evil before seeing this remake. I saw the new movie with somebody who actually liked it and argued with me about my dislike of the film on the drive home. Then I watched the original—and it gave me yet more reasons to dislike the American remake.