With spoilers, we compare Blumhouse’s 2024 horror-thriller Speak No Evil to its even darker 2022 original.
The ending of the original 2022 version of Speak No Evil is so bleak, so nihilistic and instinctively terrifying, it makes Frank Darabont’s The Mist feel like a knockabout comedy. The territory of Christian Tafdrup’s Danish cautionary tale is one of constant, unremitting dread.
This made the potential Blumhouse-backed remake from James Watkins – director of such dark horrors himself as Eden Lake (2008) and adaptation The Woman in Black (2012) – a curious proposition. How could such a tale, ran through the Hollywood machine, retain those stark Scandinavian elements that made Speak No Evil such a disturbing and haunting work?
The truth ultimately turns out to be that it doesn’t – not quite, anyway. Watkins’ remake is faithful to the original for around the first 60 to 70 minutes, at which point it veers off (quite justifiably) into its own territory, which we’ll return to later.
Crucially, the choices made by Watkins and his actors, principally James McAvoy’s larger-than-life central performance, help shape the key difference between both films: tone.
Tafdrup’s original came from his own brush with the inciting incident in Speak No Evil’s story. He was on holiday in sunny climes (Italy in both films) with his family, where they met and got on famously with a Dutch family who then, once everyone returned home, invited them to stay. Perhaps aware that holiday friendships, like holiday romances, are doomed to only work in such fantasy environments, Tafdrup turned the invitation down. It nonetheless got him thinking.
What if he and his family had said yes and it turned out to be the kind of fatal mistake visited upon Bjorn (Morten Burian), Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) and Agnes (Liva Forsberg)? As they drive to Holland and stay with the seemingly friendly, outgoing Patrick (Fedja van Huet), Karin (Karina Smulders) and their mute son Abel (Marius Damslev), they become immersed in an existential fable of dread and crippling good manners. The music – a powerful, atonal blast of trumpet, almost a herald of danger – telegraphs this, recalling Stanley Kubrick’s techniques with sound in The Shining.
Tafdrup’s film is about what happens when good manners, courtesy and benefit of the doubt thinking overrides common sense.
Throughout the entire film, red flags about Patrick and Karin are visible to Bjorn, Louise and the audience, yet they choose to disregard or ignore them, or once these strange or disturbing aspects become too glaring, make excuses for them. They exist in a world of societal rules and order that Patrick and Karin do not, an order they have consciously removed themselves from, despite very clearly being psychopaths.
These are Speak No Evil’s most powerful moments. Louise’s horror as she realises Agnes will be babysat by Muhajid (Hichem Yacoubi), a Middle Eastern refugee, while she and Bjorn go for a boozy, adults-only dinner; seeing Agnes asleep in a half-naked Patrick and Karin’s bed; or the harrowing moment where they physically and emotionally torment Abel for not dancing as well as Agnes. Louise reacts with instinctive impulses to leave at various points but is brought down by cold rationality and calculating charm, plus the guilt of Karin asking “where were you?” at moments where Agnes could have been at risk.
A careful undercurrent of Speak No Evil is how part of Bjorn and Louise want to be taken down the road they are, before it turns into abject horror. Louise wants to feel sexy in the way Karin does. Bjorn wants to feel masculine and ‘alpha’ as Patrick displays, and be as freewheeling and casual as the confident man he’s staying with. Part of the trap is how Patrick and Karin play on these insecurities within a professional, middle-class couple, happy in their life but perhaps aware on a raw, subconscious level of their own societal repression.
It partly explains how by the point the true horror central to Speak No Evil is revealed, and we arrive at the brutal final act, we can see Bjorn and Louise stripped emotionally and physically to the point where, even as he watches his daughter have her tongue cut out, Bjorn is utterly incapable of fighting back and splutters “please don’t hurt us.” As a father (especially to a daughter), it is even harder to watch and believe Bjorn would not intervene, but would we all be Bjorn in this situation? Or is he a weak man whose weaknesses have simply been laid bare?
The chilling final exchange delivers the central, terrifying enigma of Speak No Evil, as Bjorn and Louise ask “why are you doing this?” to which Patrick and Karin reply, “because you let us.”
Far from the first such victims, and unlikely to be the last, how often has such a moment passed between victim and perpetrator? How often have people like Bjorn and Louise allowed murderous manipulators like Patrick and Karin to destroy their lives? We will never know. Tafdrup’s dark adult fairytale offers no context, no explanation. Therein lies its power (or frustration, if you struggle to buy just how passive the victims are).
The remake deliberately refuses to venture down the same road. Watkins presents the same scenario, with the same principles, but adds flesh to the main characters’ bones.
Ben (Scoot McNairy) is a frustrated American whose career in London has failed to bring the success he wanted, and his relationship with Louise (Mackenzie Davis) has suffered as a result. Theirs is less a repressed middle-class dynamic but rather one with Ben as a cuckold to Louise’s frustrated, if acted on, desires for another man.
Moreover, their Agnes (Alix West Lefler) is not just a sweet child, but a teenager with significant attachment issues represented through her bunny, Ninus. In the original, Agnes is attached to her bunny but is a few years younger in age, so this is less jarring and is used primarily as a (rather twisted) plot device that keeps Bjorn and Louise in their nightmarish scenario, but in the remake, Agnes is around twelve and the bunny is a sign of her childlike nature. If she doesn’t have it with her, she self harms and goes into panic attacks. Though the bunny again serves plot, it also illuminates character.
A major change related to Agnes is how we see her interact with Ant (Dan Hough), who in the remake works to warn her about the situation her family are in, dropping clues when he can and helping Agnes, ultimately, figure out the truth (whereas it is Bjorn in the original who makes the realisation). In a clever nod to the original, Ant is Danish, which also explains why he can’t explain what is happening by writing it down. This change removes the terror of the children in the original being childlike, and the focus it squares on the parents inadvertently putting them at risk, but it gives Agnes and Ant greater agency.
Though these aspects strip away the ambiguity of the original, they invest us more deeply in our protagonists. Bjorn and Louise in the original service the story’s dread, whereas Ben and Louise have definable arcs in relation to Paddy (McEvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi). Louise gets her husband back as Ben discovers his own sense of manhood as he protects his family. Where the remake falls down is how it, by necessity perhaps, works to add motivation and backstory to the evil doers of the piece.
We knew nothing of Patrick and Karin’s rationale in the original. Tafdrup had considered adding backstory but opted against it, reckoning what we imagine – or the absence of motivation – to be more frightening. In the remake, not only do we have a calculating objective from Paddy (to make money) but also a level of psychological reasoning. Paddy is potentially not just a murderer but a groomer, if Ciara’s claim she was his first is to be believed, with Paddy strongly hinting Agnes will take her place as his partner in crime once her Stockholm Syndrome kicks in.
Fedja van Huet was skilled as Patrick because he always held a veneer of viciousness at bay, even when he was gregarious, but McAvoy is full-on charming as Paddy. He’s the fun guy in the room, the life and soul, and you can believe someone could be utterly convinced by him. McAvoy is hugely charismatic and able to turn Paddy into a physically capable, rounded villain, but he’s always operating at a heightened register. He’s larger than life, perhaps less so than his turn in Blumhouse’s Split, but dominating nonetheless. Speak No Evil 2024 is his vehicle, whereas the original balanced the four protagonists far more equally.
It allows Watkins to portray Paddy – as he’s described in interviews – as something of an avatar of toxic masculinity, akin to demagogues who pass themselves off as mentors able to pull men back to an age they were men. If Patrick is wish fulfilment for Bjorn, Paddy is a symbolic example for Ben, who’s more susceptible to his masculine radicalisation. It isn’t the core of the film, but Paddy’s power (no pun intended) in this regard is key to Speak No Evil’s narrative. The irony is that Paddy, perhaps deep down, wants what Ben has. “I always wanted a family like yours,” he tells him at one point, before the horror descends.
McAvoy’s dominant turn allows Watkins to transform the final act away from the cold realisation of Tafdrup’s dark nightmare to a more conventional horror movie climax. The remake becomes a fusion of Home Alone and Straw Dogs, with traps, shotguns and over the top confrontations. Inevitably, good triumphs over evil. No tongues are severed. No children die. Characters are given the chance to repair. The ending is much less brave and far easier to parse. Which was perhaps inevitable. Maybe you can only venture that deeply into darkness the once.
Both versions of Speak No Evil play at different registers. Both have merit. Only one, you suspect, will truly stand the test of time.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his Patreon and books, via Linktr.ee here. You can hear more on both versions of Speak No Evil here on the Modern Horror Podcast, exclusively on the Film Stories Podcast Network.
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