Squirm and squirm again: "Speak No Evil"

Unusually, it makes complete sense that someone should have thought to remake 2022's Danish shocker Speak No Evil. For all the breathless responses it inspired, that film barely made it off the festival circuit, a result of a) being two films in one, both difficult to market beyond the horror cognoscenti, and b) a final act that limited word-of-mouth to a blunt "well, that was an ordeal". (Intonation up and positive if you're a horror nut, down if you're anybody else.) It also makes sense that Blumhouse should have handed the assignment to British writer-director James Watkins, whose Eden Lake, a commendably nasty class-warfare thriller of 2008, moved through adjacent thematic territory. Where Christian Tafdrup's original honed in on cultural differences - and key differences - between the Danish and Dutch, this Anglicisation duly pits Brits (more specifically yet: the English) against Americans. Thus we find nice, mild, internationally minded Yanks Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis shuffling meekly up a West Country garden path (in an electric car, natch), pausing to gawp at the Cerne Abbas Giant's erection; they're headed there at the invite of crass Limeys James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi, who have strong feelings about the French and foreign cheese, brew their own Calvados, somehow still have Chuck Norris films on their TV, and entertain designs besides on our nervous-Nelly heroes. Here, the remake alights on something genuinely new: this Speak No Evil is the first film in cinema history where the Americans are wallflowers and milquetoasts and the Brits are the bolshy, pushy, thoughtless arseholes. How far we've come in the wake of Brexit.

For two-thirds of his running time, Watkins respects the original's structure, and in doing so he recognises that Tafdrup's was a structure worth respecting, setting us as it did to squirming through a gradual cranking-up of transgressions (grounded in everyday interactions: childcare, dining, sleeping). Anyone who's already squirmed this way will find themselves spotting small, appreciable divergences. Foremost beneficiary of the script's regional variations, McAvoy's Paddy - almost certainly the defining screen Paddy; every Englishman called Paddy I've ever met has somehow been exactly like this - is more Johnny Mercer than full-on Faragista, but still a recognisable posh type, prone to quoting Philip Larkin and rocking out to Def Leppard. But this isn't just the McAvoy show. A fine thespian bridge quartet builds believably awkward relations, and both Americans, in particular, feast on the tensions within these characters, their marriage and this social situation: the most compelling square centimetre you'll see on screen all week is the zigzagging knot between McNairy's eyebrows. Crucially, these houseguests are sentient human beings with - when it comes down to it - actual, tough choices to make, as distinct from the original's wilting patsies; that shift in characterisation ensures Watkins' film feels less of a wind-up or sick joke at someone's expense than a well-rounded comedy of manners. 

If the first film was recognisably from the country that brought you those cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the remake is very definitely from the country that gave the world The Office. (A little note of Brent enters McAvoy's performance as, over dinner, he asks his guests what the biggest sexual organ is.) Yet lest matters get too cosy or familiar, it's also - as Watkins plainly relishes - a film from the same part of that country as 1971's Straw Dogs, which brings us to the remake's biggest deviation from its source, its radical change of ending. Tafdrup's conclusion was one provocation among many; Watkins substitutes what felt to me like an entirely logical progression. (Such a logical progression, indeed, that it's the road I thought the original might have followed had its makers demonstrated any real interest in the children being shuffled around as props and plot points.) First time round, Speak No Evil was an ordeal that didn't bear thinking about, chiefly because it made very little sense beyond a certain point. The Blumhouse variation plays less like a conventional remake than a careful course correction or superior second draft, all the stronger for having given serious consideration to what did and didn't work in its source. The results are solid multiplex entertainment rather than high film art, but they also represent something rare and cheering in 2024: an instance of a studio movie not fumbling but fixing its story. Easier to hear the (ever-valid) point being made when it's not drowned out by off-camera sniggering; here, Watkins and co. swap in genuine narrative smarts.

Speak No Evil is now showing in cinemas nationwide.