Film adaptations are generally best viewed on their own without the book, play, or previous versions of the story living rent-free in one’s head. However, that’s especially difficult when it comes to a thriller so affecting as the 2022 Danish film SPEAK NO EVIL. Its American remake, with the same title, and opening in theaters today, September 13th, struggles mightily on its own to make sense even if you haven’t seen the superior foreign film. And yet, when compared to that original, it falls down on almost every level. The new take isn’t terrible, but it’s not very good either, with plenty of flaws on its own, and more than enough that pale in comparison to the original.
Both movies concern two families who meet while vacationing in Tuscany and become fast friends. Both films showcase the confident and aggressive family inviting the tentative and insecure family to their home months later for a weekend sojourn. And, if you’ve seen the American trailer, let alone the poster with a leeringly evil James McAvoy staring out at you, you know that mayhem ensues as the guests are wholly intimidated by their increasingly hostile hosts. (The marketing of the American remake is a kettle of fish that almost sinks the picture before it even starts, but I’ll get into more of that later in my review.)
The Dalton family in the remake are Americans living in England who’ve taken a much-needed break from the angst of their lives via a vacation in Italy. Dad Ben (Scoot McNairy) is depressed since he moved his family to the UK to open up an office for the company he worked for and they reneged on the offer once he got there. His marriage to his wife Louise (Mackenzie Davis) is already strained and the story will tell us why at the midway mark. To add more worry to the unemployed Ben, their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) is psychologically fragile, clinging to her plush toy as if it’s a family pet or service animal.
The hosting family consists of Irishman Paddy (McAvoy), his British wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and mute son Ant (Dan Hough). Ant is moody and often stand-offish, but his parents are gregarious, loquacious, and increasingly inappropriate with their three guests. Paddy and Ciara share too much intimate information with the Daltons, cross the line with a multitude of marriage and parenting suggestions, and even fake fellatio in front of their guests at a restaurant. Each progressive minute with them feels like a red flag, which is the source of tension in this thriller. However, where the hero couple in the first film was presented as unerringly passive to a fault, the American remake presents them as both incredibly naïve and often combative as hell. Such a passive/aggressive reworking of the hero characters by director/screenwriter James Watkins makes for a major mistake here.
Like Michael Haneke’s 1997 Austrian thriller FUNNY GAMES, so too did the 2022 version of SPEAK NO EVIL address the complicity of naive victims in their predicaments of being tormented by interlopers. But here, the filmmakers remaking SPEAK NO EVIL must have felt that American audiences would reject such weaklings, so they turn them into walking contradictions that make it hard to get a grasp on just who they are. One minute Ben is as mute as Ant, not speaking up when Paddy is too aggressive with his drinking, telling tales out of school, or driving with reckless abandon. Another moment, he’s bellowing at his wife after hours in their bedroom loud enough for the rest of the house to hear. The same contradictions mar Louise’s character as she is trying to keep up a false front one minute by sampling roasted duck after declaring herself a vegetarian, while the next moment, she’s barely containing her contempt for her hosts when they spontaneously strip down for a swim or cajole Agnes to finish her vegetables.
Quite simply, the film wants to eat its cake and have it too. Its contradictions reach a turning point halfway through the story when the Daltons decide to leave in the night, fearing for their safety but then go back to retrieve Agnes’ toy for fear that she’ll have a meltdown. That happened in the original too, though it occurs more deftly and feels consistent because the parents are presented as so overly accommodating in that version. In this take, the parents seem like fools to do so, given that they’ve pushed back forcefully before. Their return to the home plays so egregiously that the audience I saw the American remake with audibly groaned in unison when Ben turned the car around. And for me, that’s when my investment in their plight started to curdle.
In the original, such actions play as a cog in the bigger machine of the darkly comic presentation of helicopter parents who let themselves be doormats to their child and their weekend hosts. The filmmakers there were editorializing on the limits of accommodation and the passivity of a softening citizenry across the globe. Here, the story turns into a variation on FRIDAY THE 13th, only with adults instead of teens blithely ignoring all the horrors enveloping them. Indeed, the last twenty minutes of the film turn into a revenge fantasy of sorts, one that would fit in one of those slasher movies, but it feels unearned and even a betrayal of the Denmark story’s original intent. But again, I probably should’ve checked by recollection at the door of the 2022 version before entering the theater this past week for the new one.
The remake is well done in many ways. Watkins creates tension, knows how to place the camera, and gets some good moments out of his cast, particularly McAvoy. Still, the marketing department at Blumhouse Productions undermines all efforts by giving away so much in the trailer and by choosing McAvoy’s villain to be the representation of the film. Shouldn’t the hero family be our “in”? It feels like another contradiction in a thriller that wants to paint a vivid portrait of passivity before turning into a typical revenge story. And with the 2022 original clattering around in my head, I wasn’t able to buy it.
