The act of remaking such a recent film as Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (2022), one more respectively recent than The Departed and Vanilla Sky’s objects of international adaptation, brings up an unavoidable question: why was there the need for an American studio remake of something released just two years prior, especially when the original film was already mostly in English? It’s kind of tempting to simply avoid engaging with James Watkins’ 2024 Speak No Evil’s tie to the original, to instead focus on what the newer one does in its own right rather than how it might differ, surpass, or fall short. One would hope to do more with criticism than aesthetic economics. But maybe such an accounting is appropriate for a venture that seems so explicitly rooted in commerce, one whose mechanics of streamlining for consumption are more direct and apparent than others. And anyway, maybe such an accounting can reveal something more than the remake’s additions, something other than its subtractions toward efficiency, something about its transit from Denmark to America, Holland to England, or about cinematic translation itself. Of course, no accounting will be complete, certainly not in the space of a review. But every accounting will have a residue left by the forgotten or the unaccountable, an element that eludes and reveals.
The general setup for the 2024 version follows the 2022 one pretty closely. The expatriate American family consisting of Ben (Scoot McNairy), Louise (Mackenzie Davis), and their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler), who live in London, go on holiday in Italy and meet the English couple Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), as well as their son Ant (Dan Hough). The English couple invites the Americans back to spend a weekend with them at their home in the English West Country, after which a series of social conflicts and what Paddy and Ciara claim are cultural differences become increasingly antagonistic. A more serious danger is soon revealed, including a pattern of child abuse and more.
While this largely mirrors the trajectory of the 2022 version, the very first shot in each film introduces a significant splintering in form. In Tafdrup’s version: an apparent POV from a car, traveling a bumpy road at night, headlights only just illuminating it; the windshield sharp, but in shallow focus, an average amount of dirt and smudges on it; then a rack focus to the road ahead, lined with light brown shrubbery; a symphonic overture with dynamic shifts in loudness and tone on the soundtrack. A solid 45 seconds of this. And in Watkins’ film: an apparent POV from a car, but with more of the car’s interior visible on the edges of the frame, most notably the rearview mirror, which contains the reflection of a young boy’s face, with a deadpan expression. A score immediately recognizable as a horror one, with percussive plucked strings and near-dissonant wind instruments. But a cut, almost as soon as you get your bearings, moves things along, rendering the shot much shorter than the analogous one in its source material, a nighttime arrival at a hotel resort to follow.
Both shots feel like questions — about who is driving, where they’re going, etc. But the original one leaves more time for uncertainty to fester, creating a hushed, haunted atmosphere. The mechanics of the shot evoke early cinema phantom rides, in which a camera would be fixed to the front of a trolley or train, gliding along seemingly with no motivation or author at all. Watkins’ opening shot allows its question to sit for a fraction of the time, transitioning immediately with a familiar narrative propulsion, and a marker of identity in the child’s face, implying that this must be what’s important. We’re not left to wonder what to look at — we know we are drawn to faces. And we will later see this shot, with this face, echoed as a gratifying bookend.
A key conceptual difference between the films is their approach to language. The 2022 version actually takes place mostly in English, with the Danish and Dutch couple using it as their go-between language. When the Danish couple talks to each other in their native language, there are English subtitles. When the Dutch couple converse among themselves in Dutch, there are not, which breeds further disconnect. The mere fact of these choices draws attention to how language functions in general — some of the apparent misunderstandings throughout the film, even in English, seem to hinge on language’s contingency, its inability to land how we intend. The antagonists take advantage of this, overstating the misunderstandings for their own purposes, eliciting unwarranted forgiveness, in order to keep their prey around. This dynamic, to the degree that it’s based on language, is almost totally absent from the remake, in which both couples speak clear English natively. One banal exception is when Ben says he received a nice severance package after losing his job, with Paddy then telling Ciara that “severance” is the same thing as “redundancy.” But this hiccup only highlights the way language might have been played with, had there been more consequential disconnects throughout. But instead of the couples experiencing any linguistic slippage, that slippage is, interestingly, relocated onto the children.
Throughout the film, building to the most significant divergence from the original, Ant, who Paddy says has a condition where his tongue didn’t grow in properly which has made him too insecure to speak, tries to otherwise communicate his abuse and worse to Agnes. He first shows her some scars on his chest, then shows her a suspicious collection of wristwatches hidden away in Paddy and Ciara’s room, and then tries to write her a message on a small slip of paper. But the message is in another language, and she doesn’t understand. To avoid his parents finding out and punishing the attempted warning, he’s forced to literally eat his own words. Later, in the film’s most tense sequence, he’ll finally get the point across, which sends Watkins’ film on a totally different path from Tafdrup’s; that one being a Spoorloos-lite eerie death march, while this one manifests as a reverse home invasion action-thriller, once Ben, Louise, and Agnes learn that Paddy and Ciara are even more violent and deceitful than they thought.
This action-thriller is not without interest. Ben and Louise manage to barricade themselves in Paddy and Ciara’s labyrinthian home, locking out the latter pair, which creates a unique tension. The worry is, of course, that Paddy and Ciara know their home better than Ben and Louise, but the American couple also use this to their advantage. They turn rote familiarity into a weakness, employing misdirection based on expected hiding places, and using furniture, decor, and household objects in ways that confuse and shock those that live there. McAvoy, after modulating between a wonderfully hammy intensity and a quiet, tricky sadness, really ramps it up here, fully tapping into a crackling monstrosity. Davis finds a certain ruthlessness too, after Louise’s anxiety has gradually progressed throughout the film. She also initially conveys a hilarious lack of preparedness in the initial pop of violence, when she finds herself surprisingly holding a shotgun against the captors. Franciosi’s quiet depravity which has simmered for so long boils over, and McNairy portrays in Ben a flimsy cowardice that he manages to push just enough into still-tentative action.
But in the end, it’s still an ultimately kind of disappointing take on the original. Characters are crudely psychologized, carrying somewhat trite baggage and motivations, robbed of a lot of the mystery present in the 2022 version, where more is left unsaid. Each member of the protagonist family here has a fairly tidy arc of self-actualization — Agnes no longer needs her stuffed bunny she’s held onto for too long; Ben finally acts, making a tactical, non-lethal sacrifice for his family; Louise’s warranted anxiety is vindicated and overcome. And Ant, having successfully communicated his situation, once again rides in the backseat of a car at night, this time in relieved but tearful closeup, unmediated by a rearview mirror, and with a new family, despite the horror that will remain with him. The rotten, dreadful ending of the original becomes through translation a more or less totally satisfying and whole one. But this satisfaction is ultimately a contradictory one — the sense of relief it provides is precisely the reason it doesn’t leave the lingering impression of horror that the first one manages so well.
DIRECTOR: James Watkins; CAST: James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, Aisling Franciosi; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: September 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 50 min.
