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Movie Reviews
Speak No Evil
(James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, Alix West Lefler, et al / PG-13 / 1hrs 50mins / Universal Pictures)

Overview: When an American family is invited to spend the weekend at the idyllic country estate of a charming British family they befriended on vacation, what begins as a dream holiday soon warps into a snarled psychological nightmare.

Verdict: Do they even have toxic masculinity in the Netherlands? Don’t send me angry messages—I’m being facetious. But I ask this nonsense question that I already know the answer to because Danish director Christian Tafdrup somehow managed to make, what I consider to be, a horror masterpiece with his 2022 version of Speak No Evil without resorting to what is kinda becoming the cliched boogeyman of our age as its Big Bad.

But the 2024 remake from Eden Lake director James Watkins that hit theaters this past weekend—the one notable for rightly exploiting James McAvoy’s many, many bulging muscles in its ad campaign—decided instead to go the most routine of routes. Basically, at every turn. And so 2024 Speak No Evil does manage to become its own thing outside of the shadow of the original, but by paying the price of being a far less interesting film.

Also, don’t get me wrong—toxic masculinity certainly has it coming. I have nothing against toxic masculinity getting a thousand pies in the face. That was certainly there happening in the sidelines of Tafdrup’s film, for sure. But that rot was only part of the original film, which accused our entire culture of a moral malfeasance from tip to toe. The problem was systematic—the film’s title was a furious accusation of middle-class complacency. The turning of blind eyes nearly as weaponized as Jonathan Glazer did in his Nazi Family Holiday picture The Zone of Interest.

If one has or wants to choose, I recommend seeing the original film, pitch-black as night as it might be, far above and beyond seeing the remake. At least see the original first. Tafdrup’s film rewired my brain. Watkins’ version, while certainly containing plenty of small cinematic pleasures, which we’ll get into (I did already mention James McAvoy’s muscles, right?) accomplished no such feat. It’s fine, kinda meaty fun, but nothing we haven’t seen a million times since Straw Dogs in 1971.

So the story in both films remains the same, save some small particulars that eventually turn into bigger ones as they roll down the hill of the story, but we’ll get to that. We have ourselves a family of three—cuckolded dad Ben (Scoot McNairy), high-strung mom Louise (Mackenzie Davis), and their anxiety-riddled tween daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler). Americans who’ve recently moved to London, we meet them on vacation in a pornographically amber-colored corner of Italian countryside.

Despite the beauty surrounding them, there is very clearly an unspoken tension lurking between this threesome. And so when they spy a robust and happy-making family of three across the pool at the same villa—papa Paddy (McAvoy), much younger mama Ciara (Aisling Franciosi of The Fall and The Nightingale), and their boy Ant (Dan Hough) who seems to be roughly the same age as Agnes—they feel shabby by comparison. And yet extremely drawn to them as well. If those people can have such fun here maybe we can catch some of it, they seem to be thinking.

The six-some do quickly bond, in the way of those impermanent vacation relations we’ve all had. But a tossed-off invitation from Paddy to the Londoners to come visit his farm in the remote English countryside seems kind of absurd. Until it doesn’t. Now back in London Ben and Louise find themselves slipping back into their unhappy routines, so when a postcard from Paddy and fam arrives reiterating the invite a second time, they make a slightly rash decision to take it up. A long weekend in the country will surely do them all some good again, right? (Yeah, think again. We’ve seen this movie before!)

At this early point, the 2024 version of this story has already changed a few beats—ones that become pretty important down the line, so I feel the need to note them. The biggest one is that in the original film, it’s the father who makes the decision to take up the invite, bypassing his wife entirely. Tafdrup’s movie makes it wildly, crystal clear that this is out of his repressed attraction to the other man. The sexual tension between those two is played to the hilt, y’all. And so the original becomes essentially a tale of this father’s repression dooming his family. It can be argued (and I certainly would) that internalized homophobia is the original film’s villain; the quicksand that ultimately devours them all. That’s interesting stuff!

But in the remake it’s Louise who makes the choice that the family should go on this second trip, all because she’s feeling guilty about having recently cheated (by text!) on Ben. This certainly gives Mackenzie Davis more to do in this version of the film than the actress playing this role did in the original, and I can’t knock that. Davis is one of our most underrated actors, and she and Franciosi are the film’s acting MVPs, in my eyes. (For different reasons, but yes, we’ll get to that.)

But as far as “blame” can be assigned for what happens to the family in the film, it’s far less interesting to make the dynamics of their situation be those of a harridan-ish wife and her cuckolded husband learning to be proper spouses and parents. The lesson simply becomes one of rah-rah heteronormative self-improvement here. Ben’s got to learn to be a “man”—just the right kind of man. Not the James McAvoy kind. He needs to be the kind of man who lets his wife hit dudes in the head with hammers too, dang it.

If it wasn’t immediately obvious—is there anyone who didn’t see the ten billion ads they ran for this movie that gave away the entire plot?—Paddy is not the good guy they all think he is. And his invite to Ben and Louise and Agnes was not made with their family’s wellness in mind. And much of the middle portion of the remake goes exactly the same as it did in the original, with the small niceties of human relations playing their roles as the individual steps down unto the ninth circle of Hell. Both versions make an absolute feast out of our ability to doom ourselves by not speaking up when we need to, due to the overwhelming feeling of obligation we have to be polite.

It’s here where the actors really get to shine. The rubbery extent that Mackenzie Davis’ wondrous face is capable of contorting through in the span of a sentence is here wielded brilliantly and is truly something to behold—she is hilariously funny playing a woman for whom swallowing her derision takes every gangly limb’s worth of effort to do. And James McAvoy is himself having a grand old time chewing the scenery—he says he modeled his performance on British shitheel Andrew Tate, and it shows (although Tate wishes he could have 1/1000th of this charisma).

The thing is though, making all of this entertaining, that’s a big choice! One that robs us of the sinking fatalistic miserablism of the original that I found so genuinely disturbing. The only person in the cast who underplays, and brilliantly, is Franciosi—for ninety percent of this telling we have no idea what Ciara’s role is in all of this. So even as a noted fan of the original, I could not pin down where Franciosi was taking this woman. And then when it is all out there it comes as an actual gut punch; one that gives the remake’s last-act swing into over-the-top action theatrics some genuine heft and meaning. She makes the stakes feel real, and as horrific as they ought to feel.

If I’ve left out McNairy’s turn-up until now it’s because his performance, and what the remake does with his character, is the least interesting thing about it all. Ben is simply a weak man who needs to learn to be strong, but the right amount of strong that balances out correctly with his decency. He’s choosing the Tim Walz path, not the JD Vance one, which yeah, huzzah, do that. Everybody do that, please!

I just find the moral certitude of this Anglicized spin here kind of pat, as if the 2024 Speak No Evil really doesn’t want to speak of evil. It just wants to elbow evil out of the way as if such a thing is possible, and not just a fun game we play with ourselves every so often to distract from the very real fires that are raging all around us. [J.A.]





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