'Speak No Evil' is two-thirds of a great movie

The remake of the Danish horror film is an outstandingly tense dark comedy, until turning into something much more horrifying.

For its first two hours, James Watkins’ Speak No Evil is an uncomfortable comedy of manners and a series of awkward scenes between two married couples, each with one child. The third act turns into something very different. 

Nothing is wrong with that, but the movie in the third act is less interesting than the previous two. Its not nearly as tight as the first two acts, and seems to drag on forever. 

A Blumhouse release — one whose trailer has allegedly been shown the most ubiquitously of this year — Speak No Evil is a remake of a Danish film of the same (English) name that came out just two years ago. I have not seen the original, but I gather that it’s relatively faithful most of the way while dialing back quite a bit later on. I’ve heard the original described as one of the most disturbing and nihilistic horror pictures in recent history, and no one will quite say that about the new version. 

The setup is that two couples meet each other on vacation in Italy. Ben and Louise (former Halt and Catch Fire costars Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis) are Americans recently relocated to London with a 12-year-old daughter. Paddy and Ciara (James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi) are a more libertine couple with a young mute son who live in the English countryside. The two couples hit it off, and Paddy and Ciara invite their new friends for a long weekend at their isolated farmhouse.  

That’s the bulk of the film, and the tension quickly mounts, tipping over into occasional uncomfortable humor in a way that recalls Ruben Ostland’s great Force Majeure (and not its horrendous American remake, Downhill.) For the first hour, the film is delightfully uncomfortable, up to and including marital strife and arguments about parenting that cut deep. 

We learn various things about the backstories of the couples, and especially the differences between the men: While both are quick to anger, Paddy is more of a man’s man (and McAvoy is jacked to the point where his physique resembles that of Barry Bonds, circa 2002), while Ben is, for lack of a better description, a wimp.

The movies have conditioned us to believe that characters like that will redeem themselves through traditional manliness, but the film, interestingly, doesn’t do this. People in my screening screamed, “Be a man!” at him at crucial moments. 

In the family’s defense, they’re shown as not particularly adept at shooting or fighting when there’s no reason for them to be good at those things. 

But the overlong third act is more of a cat-and-mouse thriller, entirely dependent on characters repeatedly making bafflingly dumb decisions. And while the house is well-chosen as a location, somehow both sprawling and stifling, the house isn’t mapped out very well; the movie would be better if we had a better idea of which rooms related to which others. 

McAvoy is outstanding in this, doing a great deal of histrionic screaming. I’m not a fan of Split and Glass, which were the last time he played a psycho, but he’s much better here, getting to play lots of different notes. McNairy is fantastic as always at playing a sad sack, while I always enjoy seeing Mackenzie Davis in a movie. Aisling Franciosi, best known from The Nightengale, is delightfully creepy.

There’s also a goofy product placement plot contrivance involving the family’s car, which is a Tesla. The car is very important when it comes to how they might escape, and certain things happen to the car over the course of the film. But what doesn’t happen is the car running out of charge, as much sense as that would make for the plot. Because there’s no way that Tesla, or any other car company, would allow that to happen in a movie in which they have a product placement deal.