Warning: Spoilers ahead.
No movie haunts me more than “Speak No Evil.”
Not the version starring James McAvoy that’s currently in theaters, but the Danish original from 2022 (streaming on Shudder and Hoopla). That film’s Danish title translates to “The Guests,” which feels more apt than the English name: It’s about an ordinary offer of hospitality that goes horribly, horribly wrong.
In the original formulation, written by the brothers Mads and Christian Tafdrup, its director, two couples meet on vacation in the Italian countryside. Bjorn and Louise and their school-age daughter, Agnes, are Danish. Patrick and Karin are Dutch; their son, Abel, is around Agnes’s age, though he seems nonverbal. The families hit it off, and months later, the Dutch invite the Danes to spend a weekend at their rural home. Almost immediately, things feel strange.
The genius of the original “Speak No Evil” — and, to an extent, the remake — lies in how it keeps the audience on edge. Most of the tension involves trying to decide whether Patrick is lacking the more buttoned-up Danes’ sense of social niceties or is actually a violent psychopath. Patrick and Karin’s offers of food, for instance, can be read as generous or menacing. Is this a horror film, or just a really, really dark comedy about cultural differences? The filmmakers make us second-guess our reactions to every image, word and action, exactly the way Bjorn and Louise do in their hosts’ home.
For a long stretch of the new “Speak No Evil,” directed by James Watkins, the plot matches the original more or less, but the visitors are Americans living abroad (played by Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) and the hosts are British (played by Aisling Franciosi and McAvoy). The couples share meals, including one at a local roadhouse that becomes uncomfortable when the wine loosens everyone up and the conversation turns inappropriate. One night, Louise wakes to discover that her daughter is in the other couple’s bed. The guests try to flee based on a bad feeling, but are then drawn back because their daughter cannot find her favorite stuffed bunny.
By the end, the hosts are actively trying to murder their guests, who have realized their game: They meet families on vacation, invite them to visit, then murder the parents, steal their child and cut out their tongue. In both movies, when Ben/Bjorn asks Patrick/Paddy why he’s doing this, the response is the same: “Because you let me.”
It’s a chilling answer that makes you rethink the whole movie. All the moments in which the hosts have pushed their guests’ boundaries just barely over the line of plausible deniability aren’t solely the result of funny cultural differences. It’s an attempt to see whether the guests’ politeness would, in the end, make them ideal targets. The Danes’ sense of etiquette, and the Americans’ need to be liked, is what dooms them.
This is where the two movies diverge, though, and where the remake loses steam. The original “Speak No Evil” gives clues from the start that this will end with something horrible. But even with that context, the movie steadily cranks up the terror. Patrick and Karin, with a kind of tenderness bordering on affection, drag Agnes away from her parents, cut out her tongue in front of them and send her away with an accomplice. They then drive Bjorn and Louise to a rock quarry, order them to strip naked and stone them to death.
The camera hovers over the two brutalized bodies as they lie in a vaguely womblike embrace, one that could be from a painting. This, it seems, is not just a story, but the story of evil itself. It’s cruel and strikes without meaning, a display by those who would assert power over those who cede it. It’s a bleak worldview — I don’t want to believe it myself — but it’s a coherent one. The cycle of evil repeats itself because humans hold an incredible capacity to harm one another without reason or excuse.
The remake ends very differently. Ben and Louise manage to outsmart Paddy, just barely. In the process, they learn that Paddy was abused by his own father. They escape with both children, though the film ends with the camera zooming in on the tortured little boy. That last shot is the dead giveaway, the moment that demonstrates why this movie can never be as terrifying as the original.
Hollywood movies are full of villains, but the particular villainy of the Danes in that movie would never fly in the American production. There’s almost always an effort to soften the blow, to humanize the bad guy and to not leave the audience with the distinct impression that people are capable of pure evil. So it’s natural that the Hollywood remake was shoehorned into a favored trope, best summed up in a familiar axiom: Hurt people hurt people. It’s the trauma plot, in other words: Anyone who acts evilly must have endured evil themselves. That’s the basis of many horror films, twisted family dramas and pretty much the entire comic-book-movie industrial complex, aside from the legendary origin-free Joker of “The Dark Knight.”
That villains are made, not born, is on balance probably more true than the alternative. But at least in this case, it belabors the point, turning the end into something akin to a bloody and convoluted therapy and making it much less frightening.
Yet it also shifts the angle of the film’s assertions about the nature of evil. In the remake, evil is an individual matter, something that people acting alone cause to one another. Regrettable but understandable. Violence and tragedy happen because there are bad apples.
But in the original, the scope is much broader, and the movie takes on archetypal ramifications. Evil is something sunk deep in the human soul, and it doesn’t always have reasons. Raising kids right doesn’t mean they won’t turn out to be monsters. Sometimes powerful people are just bad and, more important, the systems they create can trap neighbors in terrible patterns. There’s something much more ancient and unnerving about this definition of evil, something that’s more about what lurks in our hearts. Because let’s face it: As some movies remind us (the “Purge” series, for instance), without the threat of punishment or social opprobrium, a whole lot of us would probably act bad at least sometimes.
There’s still some merit in the new version of “Speak No Evil.” But the original is much richer. It haunts me because it’s a reminder that we can’t control the darkness, that the world we live in can lack logic and fairness and safety. That’s a much more bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also an evil worth talking about.
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