On demand: "Speak No Evil"

The Danish shocker Speak No Evil caused a minor commotion on the horror festival circuit in 2022, in part, one suspects, because it looked unlike anything else on the horror festival circuit at that time. With its not uncostly aesthetic of cosy furnishings and aspirational knitwear, it gains an odd, effective quality: it's a horror film that looks like the kind of genteel Susanne Bier endeavour that would happily, and altogether mildly, meet the needs of BBC4's Saturday night "upmarket Eurofilm" slot. Yet Christian Tafdrup's film gradually reveals itself to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, nasty in both its underlying messaging and onscreen execution; what's finally been dressed up here is a nationalist party's slogan of "you can't trust foreigners these days". A Danish couple - Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) and Bjørn (Morten Burian) - befriend Dutch contemporaries Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders) on an idyllic Tuscan retreat; pointedly, they bond over their cultures' shared rejection of political correctness, although the meat-loving Dutch pair (who definitely voted for Wilders) prove more enthusiastic about this than the weaker-willed Scandinavians. The real trouble begins after the former invite the latter back to their remote Low Countries home, where the signs all's not right rapidly stack up: the hosts' heavyhanded treatment of their mute son (and dismissive treatment of his Arab babysitter), a dispute over paying for an expensive dinner, ominous soundtrack parps over shots of a windmill. The vibes are very distinctly off - and this, we are led to believe, is Europe as we find it a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

Tafdrup keeps one hand firmly on the dial that determines how off those vibes are, staging the whole film, from front to back, as a mounting series of transgressions, first conversational and only arguably forgivable, then physical (Patrick walking into a bathroom where Louise is showering, and peeping on the Danes making love), then fatal. The whole plot literally turns on a wishy-washy liberal's need to make nice: events deterioriate rapidly after mealymouthed wretch Bjørn returns to his hosts' place to retrieve a toy rabbit his daughter left behind after they fled in the middle of the night, and then has to justify taking the position he did. ("Why are you doing this?," he asks Patrick late on. "Because you let me," is the response.) This is demonstrably - and I might also say all too obviously - a film that hails from the same corner of the world that gave us the Lars von Trier variations, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt and those cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad; to find Speak No Evil as shattering as many on the festival circuit apparently did, you will need to have filtered out some fairly loud bait-the-libs snickering coming from behind the camera. One of the reasons Tafdrup made the film look as it does, you realise, is to sucker in exactly the audience whose lifestyle and attitudes he means to razz. (You too have to go along with it, in order for it to finally knock you out.) Some skill is involved in this, not least in delaying the reveal of precisely why the vibes are off, and the actors work well as a push-me-pull-you unit, taut passive-aggression giving way to actual aggression, even if I wasn't entirely sold on the bad decision-making required of the Danes to keep this ordeal going, nor finally the psychology of their tormentors. If you were feeling kindly, you'd say it was a well-engineered wind-up from a country that's come to specialise in winding the world up. If you're having an off day, you might be more inclined to label it brattish trolling, the movie equivalent of spending 95 minutes in the Breitbart comments section.

Speak No Evil is currently streaming via Shudder, and available to rent via Prime Video; an American remake opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow, and will be reviewed here in due course.