Speak No Evil (2024) Review

Technology's advanced incredibly, but emotionally speaking, we're all still just cave dwellers. it's all this perfect life, Instagram, Facebook bullshit. Everybody talking – but nobody honest."

Relax! This Speak No Evil (2024) review is spoiler-free.

Critics tend to have a pretty big bee in their collective bonnet when it comes to Western remakes of non-English speaking horror films – and usually, for good reason.

Think back to the ill-advised The Uninvited (2009), for example – Hollywood’s attempt to replicate the singularly disquieting filmic experience that was South Korea’s A Tale of Two Sisters – or similarly of-their-time misfires such as One Missed Call (2008) or The Eye (2008): remakes of Japan’s Chakushin Ari (2003) and the Hong Kong-Singaporean Gin Gwai (2002), respectively. Even more recently, 2015’s Martyrs – which lacked the philosophical, polarising portrait the 2008 French original so bleakly painted – illustrated that the magic of overseas endurance horror is even harder to adapt or replicate through a Western lens.

I say this because, on paper, Speak No Evil (2024) – a remake of Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 Danish film Gæsterne, which translates literally, and more aptly, as The Guests – shouldn’t have worked. Released only two years after its source material, you could be forgiven for thinking it had all the hallmarks of a rushed Hollywood slop-job of a film: to be seen, compared unfavourably with the original, and ultimately, inevitably, forgotten.

But guess what? Speak No Evil (2024) is stone-cold brilliant.

Another addition to a spate of 2024 vacation-from-hell films – a list that includes Get Away (2024) and The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024), among others – its premise is brutally simple; and perhaps, initially, even familiar.

Here it is: your average all-American family meets another family (in this case, Brits) while on holiday, and form that kind of awkward, opportunistic friendship designed to last a few days, before drifting into nothingness when everyone gets on their respective flights back home. In Speak No Evil’s case, our American protagonists are the Daltons: parents Ben (Scoot McNairy), Louise (Mackenzie Davis), and daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler). While relaxing poolside, they cross paths with the brash and bombastic – yet weirdly, perversely charming – Fields: Paddy (an astonishingly good James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi, of 2023’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter), and their son Ant (Dan Hough). Ant, Paddy explains, has a condition in which he was born with a tongue too small for his mouth, and can’t speak beyond the occasional guttural, animalistic noises.

The Fields are the archetype of the annoying couple on holiday. (And the fact that they’re British was a canny, and surely intentional, casting decision.) Paddy cannonballs flamboyantly into the pool; openly mocks some of the families’ dry – but well-meaning – fellow hotel guests; get loudly drunk by the poolside.

But Paddy’s charisma and Ciara’s more demure, kindly nature offset each other well, and the Daltons – mainly Ben – are taken by them. They share some meals, and make vague plans to catch up when they’re back in the UK. (The Daltons are living in London after Ben was moved there for work; the Fields are based deep in the Devonshire countryside.) Again, it’s the kind of invitation that feels earnest and actionable at the time – but almost always dissipates when the passports are stamped and routine sets in back home.

But. But, the Fields reach out via a postcard – adorned with a picture of the two families vacationing – and solidify the invitation. Louise is reluctant, but Ben persists, and they make the journey out to the Fields’ isolated cottage out in the middle of nowhere.

Scenes involving the Fields' home, located in Devonshire in Speak No Evil (2024), were filmed at Saxon's Lode Manor House near Malvern Hills, Worcestershire.

At first glance, the whole thing seems idyllic – like how I imagine most Americans probably think England is when dreaming up quixotic trips to its green fields and quaint landscapes of barns and rolling meadows. But – but – things were never going to be as they first seemed. The Daltons become increasingly unnerved at their hosts’ strange, passive-aggressive behaviour towards them and one another, and here it’s worth mentioning the star of the show – Scottish actor James McAvoy.

Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ben (Scoot McNairy) go hunting.

Superlatives don’t do justice as to just how good he is here. He plays Paddy with dime-turns of jocularity and aggression; balancing comedy with cool, calculated menace. (All underpinned, of course, by the sheer bulk of the guy – it’s clear he’s lost none of the weight gained for 2016’s Split, and the skinny, jaded of corporate drone of Wesley Gibson in 2008’s Wanted is a distant memory. The guy is JACKED.) Paddy hunts foxes, he can make a fire out of nothing, he stands on hillsides and shouts into the void to relieve stress. He smokes weed. He's the everyman – the one we fear and loathe but yet still somehow envy, in some odd way. Even when Louise confesses to Ben that she finds them unpleasant, the Fields' escalatingly unsettling eccentricities still have this odd, gluey charisma to them.

Mackenzie Davis as Louise in Speak No Evil (2024)

Other things begin to grate on the Daltons. Ant, sleeping in a room with Agnes, reveals to her the bruises coating his body; Ciara, too, is black and blue. Paddy berates and bullies Ant, but – crucially – this abuse is only revealed to the Daltons (and us) in stages. Most of the Fields’ destructive behaviour they (and we) observes is unacceptable, unconscionable, but herein lies the rub – that it simply becomes too awkward for the Daltons to leave. Here, the Speak No Evil remake – just as its predecessor did before it – plays gleefully with the rules of social engagement, and the remarkable lengths us humans will go to to avoid falling foul of social niceties. To be polite. The Daltons simply can’t bring themselves to transgress those thinly-sketched boundaries that govern when we draw the line – and so, by the time they do draw that line, the Fields have taken things to a whole new level.

James McAvoy's performance as Paddy is the bedrock Speak No Evil (2024) is built upon.

Yet Speak No Evil works as well before any of the stuff that happens later takes place. It works, first and foremost, by leveraging our fears of those awkward exchanges, those cringe-inducing dynamics, those social situations gone wrong.

We also learn that the Daltons' reluctance to call it quits has another level – that they're working through the interpersonal trauma of their own relationship, one marred by infidelity and a lack of open, honest communication that has manifested in simmering, festering resentment. For them, this holiday wasn't just a weekend getaway – it was a chance to patch things up. It was a proxy for their own beaten, battered marriage; a chance to prove that something, perhaps anything, was still there.

And it makes what comes next all the more chilling.

Agnes (Alix West Lefler) makes an unsettling discovery in Speak No Evil (2024).

I’m reluctant to go any further here at the risk of spoiling anything major. I went into this one cold, just like I did with the 2022 remake of Goodnight Mommy (another Western rehash of a non-English speaking original that I haven’t seen) and it made all the difference.

I’m generalising here, but it doesn’t seem like us cinephiles do that enough anymore – ”go in cold” to a film, knowing the bare minimum about the plot or setup – and that’s a shame.

Goodnight Mommy (despite more than its fair share of withering reviews) was excellent.

Speak No Evil (2024) is even better.

Speak No Evil is available to watch now on Netflix in Australia. Get across it!

Oh, and if you were wondering if there are any good Western remakes of foreign horror films, the good news is yes – there are! The bad news? There are only three:

• Let Me In (2010) – a remake of 2008’s Let the Right One In (Sweden)

• The Ring (2002) – a revisiting of Japan’s Ringu (1998)

• Quarantine (2008) – a redo of 2007’s [REC] from Spain

I’m kidding – there are way more than three! Fancy dropping your fave in the comments?

And, if you liked this Speak No Evil (2024) review, remember: Talking Terror is your place for the latest and most vintage of horror films. Seriously – I’ve covered films as old as Black Sabbath (1963) and I Drink Your Blood (1971), as well as newbies like Terrifier 3 (2024) and MadS (2024). I’m just a one-man band at this stage, so it take me a little time to get around to stuff at times – but if there’s a horror film that’s burning a hole in your pocket, and you’re desperate for a fresh review of it, then let me know. I’ll do my best!