If you like Fatal Attraction, Pacific Heights or Single White Female, this thriller is for you.
Speak No Evil, one of 2024’s tensest thriller movies, has been made available to watch at home via NOW and Sky Cinema.
The film centres around a married American couple (Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) who, while vacationing with their young daughter in Italy, befriend a charming British couple (Aisling Franciosi and James McAvoy) with a young son.
Some time after the Italian holiday, the Americans are invited by their vacation friends to spend a weekend at the latter’s remote farm in the West Country.
What should be a relaxing country stay soon warps into a psychological nightmare, as the British couple reveal themselves as being quite different to how they first appeared.
A remake of a very shocking 2022 Danish flick of the same name, the 2024 version of Speak No Evil sands a lot of the rough edges off of the original, as is often the case with English-language remakes of foreign movies.
In this particular instance, however, the changes are welcome, resulting in a more conventionally entertaining thriller that feels like its own distinct entity.
It helps, too, that the central premise is so strong and that the cast members in the remake are all excellent.
You can read a segment of JOE’s Speak No Evil 2024 review, from when it was in cinemas, below:
“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.
“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.”
Speak No Evil 2024 has just been made available to watch through NOW and Sky Cinema. The Danish original is also currently streaming on Shudder.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ podcast – listen to the latest episode now!
