Share
12th September 2024
12:52pm BST
In 2022, an unforgettable Danish thriller named Speak No Evil was released.
Comparable to Funny Games and Oldboy, it is the type of dark and twisted movie made outside of Hollywood that leaves a permanent mark on the psyche of those who watch it.
It centres around a Danish married couple on holiday in Italy with their daughter who hit it off with a fellow Dutch couple who have a boy with no tongue.
In particular, the Danish husband - who feels emasculated in his daily life - is drawn to the Dutch husband and his devil-may-care attitude.
Some time after the Italian holiday, the Danes are invited by their vacation friends to spend a weekend at the latter's remote Netherlands farm.
Taking them up on the offer, over the course of the visit, tensions flare due to the couples' different approaches to life - as the Dutch people reveal themselves to be quite different to how they first appeared.
An incredibly gripping if agonising descent into hell - that is also chock-full of social commentary - Speak No Evil earned a ton of acclaim from critics.
And as is often the case with beloved international movies, a remake was quickly commissioned and has arrived just two years later.
Also titled Speak No Evil, the remake retains the basic premise of the original - swapping the Danish couple for Americans (played by Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) and the Dutch characters for English people living in the West Country (Aisling Franciosi and James McAvoy).
On one hand, this Hollywood version of the story commits a lot of the sins of many US remakes - it has less trust in its audience, over-explaining plot points once beautifully ambiguous; it adds more action; it softens the original's sense of bleakness.
That said, in the hands of writer-director James Watkins (no slouch when it comes to horror thrillers, having made Eden Lake and The Woman in Black) and a game cast (McAvoy, always better playing darker characters, is having a particular blast), these changes are less of a problem than they could have been.
While the reimagining certainly lacks the compelling nihilism and gutsy follow-through of the Danish version, the framework of the story actually suits very well a particular type of classic Hollywood sub-genre: the "from hell" thriller or in this case "the vacation friends from hell" thriller.
Speak No Evil 2024 is less of an audience-testing shocker like the original but more in the same vein of Fatal Attraction, Single White Female or Pacific Heights - adult-focused thrillers about people being seduced by charming strangers with sinister ulterior motives.
It changes the subtext of the Danish version from a husband and father's sense of inadequacy leading to his family's downfall into a story about a family with fraying bonds being tested by outside forces.
When taken at this level, the English-language Speak No Evil is very watchable, adding enough changes to make it stand on its own two feet.
That said, it also retains several of the painfully awkward social interactions between the two central couples and plenty of the gasp and sigh inducing moments that made the original resonate so strongly with viewers.
Since the Danish version of the story went straight to streaming in Ireland and the UK (you can still watch it on Shudder), perhaps its enough of a case to remake it just to experience those moments on the big screen with an audience.
For being based on such a shocking film, the 2024 Speak No Evil accomplishes something very surprising - it makes for a great date movie, one that will thrill patrons while also having them talk for hours after the credits roll about what they would have done differently to the characters.
And if it gets audiences to discover the original, that's all the better.
Read more:
Explore more on these topics:
The JOE Film Club Quiz: Week 84
movies tv
