REVIEW: ‘Speak No Evil’ (2024) Dulls The Original’s Edge

2022’s Speak No Evil is one of the most affecting horror films of the decade. Danish filmmaker Christian Tafdrup‘s vacation nightmare teases out the intense discomfort a family experiences visiting another family they had just met on holiday. As the atmosphere gets thicker, the film arrives at an unspeakably bleak conclusion that leaves me and other viewers physically ill.

The perverse power of Speak No Evil made it the buzz of the horror community, so much so that Blumhouse snatched up the rights for an American remake despite the film already being in mostly in English. People were expectedly nervous, and they were right to be. The Blumhouse version of Speak No Evil severely misunderstands the appeal of the original, offering little but a pale imitation in its place, although its third act suggests it could’ve been retooled into something that stands on its own.

The general outline is basically the same. On vacation with their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler), Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise Dalton (Mackenzie Davis) are taken by the carefree, eccentric attitude of Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), who are there with their son Ant (Dan Hough), who was born without a tongue. When Paddy and Ciara invite the London-based American family to go visit them in the countryside, the Daltons accept. What starts as a pleasant visit slowly turns sour as Paddy and Ciara reveal themselves to be very different people than the Daltons thought they were.

In theory, a remake should stand on its own. Speak No Evil doesn’t really fall into that category, because it constantly attempts to redo sequences from the original, almost beat for beat. Recreating the original’s thick, uncomfortable atmosphere is a lofty goal to strive for, but Speak No Evil doesn’t even come close to recreating it. Director James Watkins (The Woman in Black) seems to treat the majority of the runtime as a checklist. Watkins speeds through the beats, not allowing any of the discomfort to register and failing to properly characterize anyone. It’s hard to feel unnerved by the two couples interacting when Speak No Evil feels too eager to get to the next scene.

This leads to a lot of overdone exposition for the Daltons. Ben and Louise, played decently by Scott McNairy and Mackenzie Davis, have newly added relationship issues that form a rift of trust between them. For something that takes up a lot of screentime and could be using twisting the atmospheric knife, so to speak, it feels like redundant conflict was added for the sake of padding out the characters. Similarly, James Watkins’ script fails to properly endear the Daltons to Paddy and Ciara, making them pretty much ready to head out the door as soon as they get there. There’s no push-and-pull, instead McNairy and Davis seem to have been given the thankless jobs of being stressed out and mad each other. That’s basically it.

Moreover, Paddy and Ciara feel more like caricatures than believable villains. In 2022’s Speak No Evil, a light-hearted conversation could flip into an exhibition of some truly nasty behavior from Paddy and Ciara, analogs of Patrick and Karin. An essential part of what made this work is that the protagonist couple was Danish and the antagonist couple was Dutch, with each meeting in the middle with English as a shared language, leading to our leads chalking up unsavory behaviors to something being lost in translation. The scenes would drag on so long that you could see Patrick and Karin finding a way to explain or excuse their own behavior and put the other couple at ease, even if momentarily.

Here, Paddy and Ciara’s peculiar behavior feels like a punchline. James McAvoy plays to the rafters, and to be fair, it is a wildly entertaining performance. His overly cheery, rambunctious demeanor suddenly being broken by a sprinkling in of a truly rude remark or action earns tons of uncomfortable laughter. And that could’ve been a decent approach. Aisling Franciosi certainly has the chops to keep up with McAvoy, so making this a dark comedy- a sort of “normal couple vacations with the couple from hell” romp that zips by could’ve worked if the film was more aligned with their performances.

In the third act, Speak No Evil breaks with the original entirely. Completely removing the infamous ending, Speak No Evil constructs a brand-new third act that plays like a sort of reverse home invasion thriller. It’s absolutely a betrayal of the entire point of the original… but it’s also the only thing that really works in the remake. Speak No Evil gains an identity by becoming a trashy crowdpleaser, shot with frenetic grit by Tim Maurice-Jones. In the final moments, my crowd was hooting and hollering, the approach finally came together, and, even though it was copping out to the highest order, it delivered something worthy on its own.

At that point, it’s way too little, way too late. Speak No Evil was going to get the Hollywood treatment, whether people liked it or not. James Watkins felt the need to sloppily tread over the exact same scenes as the original film only to switch gears in the eleventh hour and turn it into an entirely different type of film. If he was going to do that, Speak No Evil should’ve been built from the ground up as a reimagining of the original. Unfortunately, now it’s simply another bad remake with a personality crisis.

Speak No Evil hits theaters September 13, 2024.