Yahoo Movies Speak No Evil review: Social satire meets pure terror in a chilling Danish thriller
Pay no attention to the shades of late-night cable in the title; Speak No Evil is a lamentably generic name for a movie as stark and unsettling as Christian Tafdrup's queasy, caustic thriller, streaming on Shudder and in limited theatrical release this week (as in many things, it's better in the original Danish: Gæsterne, or "The Guests").
In their own way though, both make sense for a story whose horrors take the idea of guest behavior to its logical extreme. What if the social contract we all live by — the imperative to be polite and gracious and no matter how uncomfortable things get, go along — was actually (and literally) a fatal flaw? At the outset, Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) are just happy to meet another couple on their Italian vacation with a child the same age as their own; Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders) are a bright gregarious pair from Holland, and their little boy Abel (Marius Damslev) seems to love playing with Agnes (Liva Forsberg), even if he doesn't say much. (It's just a speech impediment, his father explains, caused by a genetically foreshortened tongue.)
What happens in Tuscany would normally stay there, so when Patrick and Karin first extend an invitation to come spend a long weekend in the Netherlands, Bjorn and Louise initially hesitate; they're called "vacation friends" for a reason. But good faith and mild curiosity win, and their small family sets out for the day-long drive, pulling up to a woodsy little enclave in the Dutch countryside. Everything seems fine enough a first: The kids are happy to be reunited, and there's enough wine and conversation to go around.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute/Erik Molberg 'Speak No Evil'
But soon it's obvious how scantly they all know one another — and how little Bjorn and Louise like these strange, belligerent people, the more they see. Patrick, who casually mentioned his work with Doctors Without Borders when they first met, doesn't seem to know what to do with a simple cut from a kitchen knife, though he hardly holds himself to any boundaries when it comes to the shared bathroom. Karin has her own quirks — including a tendency to turn an adults-only dinner date into a kind of erotic performance art — but the most disturbing thing is the pair's shared approach to parenting, which quickly crosses the line from laissez-faire to straight-up vicious.
Tafdrup, who directs and co-wrote the script with his brother, Mads, isn't immune to some of the hoarier genre clichés (empty gas tanks, ill-timed emergencies); when his increasingly distressed protagonists let one and then two chances to leave slip through their fingers, it's hard not to want to reach into the screen and physically drag them back to Denmark. But he has a spare, elegantly slow-burn style of teeing up his plotlines, and a keen eye for the strange vagaries of human behavior.
At first, that approach seems almost too subtle; who hasn't suffered through a socially uncomfortable weekend and lived to tell the tale? For a film that depends far more on sustained dread than jump scares, though, the payoff almost over-delivers — a twist so casually depraved it's one of the more genuinely shocking endings on screen this year. (You can almost hear nihilist masters of the form like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier humming their approval). Like so many recent Scandinavian exports, there may already be an American remake in play. Let them try, but a glossy Hollywood polish feels like the last thing this movie needs; Speak already knows exactly what it wants to say. Grade: B+
