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Speak No Evil (2024) is another Blumhouse Production that throws reasonable money at the horror genre and lets the standard horror movie box office fill their coffers.
This time Blumhouse pulled in almost $77 million on a $15 million remake of a Danish film that came out two years earlier. With that kind of haul, they can make two more horror movies and still have enough left over for more houses…and blums.
We are familiar with cringe humor, which is based on social morons navigating uncomfortable situations. A good example of this is Between Two Ferns with Zack Galifianakis.
Speak No Evil is an example of cringe horror. A family invites another family to stay with them and proceeds to make them weirdly uncomfortable until murder happens. The moral of the story is don’t be polite to the point of being a target. In that case, as a Minnesotan, I’m screwed. If we are polite enough to eat Jell-O with olives in it, we are basically polite enough to do be the victims of anything.
Major spoilers will also happen.
Speak No Evil
Speak No Evil stars James McAvoy (Gnomeo & Juliet) as the needling patriarch who enjoys talking about toilet paper preferences at the lunch table and forcing vegetarians to eat meat. McAvoy clearly has fun with the role. He’s a swole tomcat playing with a mouse’s emotions. He makes a person feel uncomfortable then makes them feel bad for feeling uncomfortable.
Aisling Franciosi (The Last Voyage of the Demeter) plays McAvoy’s wife. She is just along for the ride. The movie gives her little to do, other than be McAvoy’s beard, in the sense that a psycho who has a wife is maybe not a psycho, after all, in the eyes of polite society.
Dan Hough (Hollyoaks) is the couple’s child. He is missing his tongue. The fact that he can’t speak is a travesty. What’s even worse is that he can’t taste cheeseburgers anymore.
As for the other family, they are led by Alpha Mom Mackenzie Davis. She looks a little more feminine in this role, as she is not starring opposite an aged Linda Hamilton. That is why they chopped Davis’s hair off in Terminator: Dark Fate and made her look like Stuart from MadTV. Allowing her to have sex appeal would have made Hamilton’s age pop even worse onscreen.
Scoot McNairy (Batman v Superman) is Beta Dad. He is emotional, weak and easily manipulated. They likely cut the scene where he lactates soy.
Alix West Lefler (The King Tide) plays their daughter. She is a child with anxiety issues, so much so that even as the family drives away to safety, she forces them to go back to get her stuffed rabbit doll because it makes her feel safe.
You know what would make me feel safe? Leaving the psycho family far behind!
Speak No Evil Dead
James Watkins directed Speak No Evil. He also brought us the feel-good movie Eden Lake. I have never watched it, but Boba Phil insists it is a wonderful date movie, so I think I will view it with my wife on our next anniversary. Thanks for the tip, Boba!
The fact that Watkins can go from a date movie to a film about a couple in mortal peril shows great range. His work on Speak No Evil is serviceable. He commits no great sins. On the other hand, he commits no great scenes to the screen either.
Watkins also delivered the screenplay, which is based on the original work by Christian and Mads Tafdrup. Like his directing, the screenplay is mostly serviceable. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. As for how satisfactorily those elements are delivered, that is up to the individual viewer.
Speak No Evil Toons
Speak No Evil is best described as a thriller for normies. Your average, ordinary, everyday Joe or Josephine will have a decent time with it. A more discerning movie fan may get the feeling something is missing.
For an R movie, Speak No Evil is quite soft. The kitchen scene from Jurassic Park is Speak No Evil in a nutshell. The raptors chasing the kids around the cupboards and dangling utensils is fun, but it is devoid of suspense. The viewer knows nothing will happen to the kids.
So, it is with Speak No Evil. A sense of danger is established, and Watkins mostly maintains it into the second act, but the movie eventually spirals out of control. The bad people hunt the good people around the house, and it is an easy battle for the good guys. They are never truly challenged with anything too hard.
I have not seen the original, but from what I know, that one does go hard — perhaps a little too hard. I’m not a fan of horror movies that beat the main characters up the entire time and then kill them off in a nihilistic ending for good measure. Downer conclusions have their place, but seemingly every horror movie started going with a downer ending in the 2000s, and it grew tedious.
A middle ground of edginess probably exists between Speak No Evil 2024 and Speak No Evil 2022. Maybe they can reach that Goldilocks zone in the next remake…
Shut up, Evil
In the end, Speak No Evil 2024 seems to pull back from portraying McAvoy and company as simply crazy by showing their actions have a business aspect to them, as well. Again, I have no idea if the original used this angle, but it is a plot hole that doesn’t need to exist.
McAvoy is supposed to be a crafty killer, but how crafty can he be if he keeps the belongings of his victims and a scrapbook of everyone he killed and then enlists the help of a local man to sell their vehicles for him?
It seems exceedingly risky to create that kind of a security leak.
Police: Hey, Billy Bob, we discovered a car you sold was owned by a missing family. We then discovered all the cars you sold were owned by missing families. Can you explain that?
Billy Bob: Sure. I got them from the serial killer down the road. He also keeps all of the belongings of his victims and a scrapbook of their pictures. But you didn’t hear that from me. *wink*
Police: *wink* Thanks, Billy Bob. We’ll go arrest him now.
As you can see, Speak No Evil didn’t quite do its job. A good genre movie generally makes one’s brain shut up. Speak No Evil made my brain speak up.
The makers of the original weren’t happy with the remake either. They said, “I don’t know what it is about Americans, but they are brought up for a heroic tale, where the good must win over the bad, and this version of the film cultivates that.”
1970s American cinema begs to differ…
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