Review: A remade ‘Speak No Evil’ is less evil, swapping out Euro-bleakness for a family’s bonding

A soul-chilling modern horror classic has been given a giggly date-night polish in the Blumhouse remake of the 2022 Danish film “Speak No Evil.” Beyond the usual Hollywood impulse to try to increase art-house-sized audiences to big box-office levels, there was really no reason to remake Danish filmmaker Christian Tafdrup’s squirmy hell-is-other-people scenario. But in doing so, writer-director James Watkins has swapped out malevolence for a tamer sense of misadventure. The takeaway? Lingering dread isn’t multiplex-friendly.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with remakes, which, when executed wisely, should give leeway for a different chef’s take on an established dish. And at first, the bones of this “Speak No Evil” effectively mirror the unassuming allure and eccentricity of the original’s groundwork in how tourists bond. Under a stock-standard Tuscan sun, married American couple Louise (Mackenzie Scott) and Ben (Scoot McNairy) spark with a British family sharing their fancy villa. They are a rascally charming, forthright doctor named Paddy (James McAvoy), his smiling wife, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and their mute, reserved boy, Ant (Dan Hough).

Ant bonds with Louise and Ben’s own kid, the similarly withdrawn 11-year-old Agnes (Alix West Lefler). After the dinner chat among the adults proves lively and inspiring, in no time there’s a plan for them all to reunite back in the U.K. at the rustic, secluded farmhouse property in the north country where Paddy and Ciara live.

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Nov. 22, 2023

During a long country weekend, however, the hosts’ energetic hospitality betrays an edge, mainly to do with Paddy’s mercurial, insistent personality and flashes of ill temper toward Ant. But also in how gleefully he’ll push Louise and Ben into a frozen discomfort, as if playing a social-norms parlor game: poking at Louise’s vegetarianism, stiffing them with a dinner bill and taking open displays of horniness too far. In these scenes, it’s hard to take your eyes off the glinting McAvoy, who’s like some fiendish juggler of items both benign and dangerous. You know he’ll throw something at you if you’re not prepared.

But while Ben and Louise, already not the most secure of unions, argue where their bailout line is, Ant seems intent on secretly communicating to Agnes something gravely serious about the situation they’re in. And that’s when the unsettling road that the new film, to this point, has mostly shared with the Danish original suddenly forks, sending its characters into a very different endgame, one with a vastly different tone and outlook.

The central deviation is that this “Speak No Evil,” with its more pronounced humor and catharsis, treats the other film’s scenario as a ghastly comedy of manners rather than as a brutalizing, unheroic descent. In other words, it’s no longer true horror. But, hey, it’s hard to sell tickets to the feel-bads, so a trap becomes a maze, the weak become the strong and predators learn a little bit about being the prey. Who wants to leave the theater remembering how unsettling it was initially to watch observant, good people ignore every protective instinct, a merciless commentary on our thirst-to-belong society?

And sure, some of what’s different here is admirably pulse-racing, because Watkins constructs a sturdy ride, including the amusing needle drop of an ’80s song best left unspoiled. He’s also gifted with a great cast, starting with McAvoy and very much extending to the exquisite marital purgatory of McNairy and Scott But when you won’t speak the evil of “Speak No Evil,” then a disservice has been done to the source terror and how expertly it refused to deliver us to a safe place.