Speak No Evil review – an effec­tive game of cat and mouse

One minute they’re your bezzie mates, they’re get­ting in the pints, wrap­ping you up in an asphyx­i­at­ing bear-hug, invit­ing you over to hang out with the fam, and the next… well, they’re show­ing you that all their pre­tences were false, and then some. Speak No Evil is a care­ful­ly Xerox­ed Eng­lish lan­guage remake of Chris­t­ian Tafdrup’s 2022 film of the same name, with some of its more bleak­ly unpalat­able edges soft­ened for the broad­er tastes of the mul­ti­plex set.

Riff­ing on the clin­i­cal bour­geois evis­cer­a­tion of Michael Haneke’s unwatch­able 1997 clas­sic, Fun­ny Games, this sees a US expat fam­i­ly in Tus­cany on their hol­i­days fall under the spell of the ultra-charis­mat­ic Pad­dy (James McAvoy), a West Coun­try doc­tor (so he claims) with the abil­i­ty to light up any room he enters. Along with his dot­ing, kind­ly wife Cia­ra (Ais­ling Fran­ciosi) and tongue­less son Ant (Dan Hough), they make for the per­fect, refresh­ing hol­i­day hook-up: no airs; self-aware; suf­fi­cient­ly chill; and world­ly enough to sug­gest a deep­er emo­tion­al bond could be forged.

Back in rain-sod­den Lon­don, Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise (Macken­zie Davis) decide to take daugh­ter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) to vis­it Paddy’s coun­try pile for a long week­end of cider, shoot­ing and, as it tran­spires, extreme dis­com­fort and humil­i­a­tion. The film is can­ny in mak­ing you wait before it allows the inevitable pen­ny to drop, and this is anoth­er of a cycle of films in which well-to-do mid­dle-class out­siders are made to reflect deeply on their own pet­ty hypocrisies before they’re allowed any type of respite.

The film’s pro­nounced genre roots serve to den­i­grate some of its pow­er as a social satire, and it’s too clear that there’s some­thing up with Pad­dy and his brood long before we see Ant’s des­per­ate attempts to sig­nal that there’s dan­ger up ahead. McNairy and Davis serve their pur­pose of look­ing bemused and aloof, while McAvoy is allowed to chomp on the scenery as the jacked con­fi­dence man in the guise of a chum­my coun­try squire.

It’s not say­ing or doing much that we haven’t seen before, but it plays its well-known cat-and-mouse game very effec­tive­ly, and McAvoy in par­tic­u­lar employs the micro inflec­tions of body lan­guage to tease the late-game volte face. There’s def­i­nite­ly some humour here too, such as a sequence in which Pad­dy blasts out The Ban­gles’ ​‘Eter­nal Flame’ while dri­ving Ben out to cull some fox­es, and there are some very on-the-mon­ey obser­va­tions about the sur­re­al exis­ten­tial val­ue of cud­dly toys to chil­dren. But the final act seems hap­py to lean on cranky char­ac­ter moti­va­tions and sil­ly back­sto­ry as a way to just let the fire­works do what they do best.

It’s inter­est­ing to see the Blum­house fac­to­ry line deliv­er a remake that’s a lit­tle more off-kil­ter and adult-ori­ent­ed than the norm, and it’ll be inter­est­ing to see if genre fans are dis­ap­point­ed by how much of this film plays like straight dra­ma. But Watkins’ slick direc­tion and McAvoy’s frankly ter­ri­fy­ing per­for­mance make this an effec­tive, wor­thy if not essen­tial entry into the ​“If you go out to the woods today…” creepy canon.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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