Most of us are guilty of it one way or another. Keeping silent when some sort of wrong has been done to you in order to either acquiesce to polite social norms or simply because you can’t be bothered to “kick up a fuss”. Be it a missing Amazon order you don’t chase up, an incorrected food order at a restaurant or even something as serious as not speaking up while witnessing some form of injustice to you or others around you, society seems to have changed some of us into people so uncomfortable about speaking out, that we’d tolerate all manner of shit before we’d say boo to a goose.
Enter Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil, a satirical psychological horror about how our obsession about following perceived etiquette can leave you utterly defenseless when your boundaries are pushed by people who have none that results in possibly the most uncomfortable psycho-thriller since Michael Haneke’s Funny Games or James Watkins’ Eden Lake – which is something of a coincidence seeing as Watkins has a remake of this very movie on the way…
While on holiday in Tuscany, Danish couple Bjørn and Louise and their daughter Agnes are seemingly going through the motions, with Bjørn particularly seeming rather listless and apathetic about family life. Quietly bristling at having to do certain accepted duties, like holding dinner parties for boring friends and searching for his daughters lost toy rabbit for the umpteenth time is obviously grating on him, but that changes somewhat when his family bump into Dutch couple Patrick and Karin and their mute son Abel. Charmed by Patrick’s welcoming manner, the two families enjoy each others company, but a while after the holiday has ended, Bjørn and Louise receive a postcard that invites them to come and stay with Patrick and Karin at their home for a weekend. Louise isn’t so sure, but Bjørn seems more than happy to go and stay with the man who massaged his ego so and before you can say “Red Flag” into a mirror 5 times, the family have agreed and hopped in their car.
Things start out nice, as they often do, but as the weekend progresses, Patrick and Karin become ever so more demanding, with their behavior veering into the darker parts of passive aggressive with every moment, but even after a string of events that include the vegetarian Louise being constantly served meat, Patrick drunk driving them all home from a restaurant and making Agnes sleep on a mattress on the floor, Bjørn is still unwilling to take his hosts to task for fear of offending his hosts.
Of course, things soon start to escalate out of control when Louise finally speak out about Patrick’s mistreatment of his son, but by then things have already gone past the point of no return and soon Bjørn and Karin have found themselves ensnared in a web that’s partially of their own making.
Oh how things have changed. Back in the early days of his career, the late, great Wes Craven made The Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes, a two-tone punch about families under siege who have to lose all traces of their civility in order to survive the horrors that await them that heavily suggested that our polite nature is merely a shroud that can be discarded in favour of regressing into animalistic violence if our tribe is threatened. Well, fast forward to 2022 and Tafdrup seems to be suggesting the opposite and that in the socially awkward minefield we find ourselves living in these days, there’s a chilling third option to the old “fight or flight” adage – simply do nothing. Thus we find ourselves watching a movie that will no doubt be misinterpreted by those hoping for a more simple, survival based horror thriller, but you can’t help but realise that that was the director’s intent all along.
Before watching and reviewing the film, I cast an eye over a few reviews that exist for the movie on the likes of Letterboxd and Shudder (who are streaming it) just to see the diverse reactions to it and if the amount of rage the film has generated by frustrated thrill-seekers could be transferred into dollars, the box office for Speak No Evil would have been very healthy indeed. Simply put, the movie puts forward a (hopefully) exagerated scenario that suggests that we as a society have been driven to a point where we’re utterly unable to stand up for ourselves no matter how bad it gets.
The leads are great with Morten Burian and Sidsel Siem Koch portraying two disturbingly normal people who find themselves caught between the rock of their own awkwardness and the hard place of their insistent, socially liberated hosts who are played by Fedja van Huêt and Karina Smulders with such understated, slow burning menace, you might not even know you was watching a ghoulish horror/thriller if for some reason you had no clue what you were watching.
However, the real star here is the unfeasible amounts of rage triggering dread that’ll no doubt have you screaming at the screen in frustration as our “heroes” seem to display absolutely no survival instincts whatsoever. But that’s precisely Tafdrup’s aim and he suckers you in like a champ to the point where you’re cringing at Bjørn’s attempts to establish dominance every bit as much as you are the horrors that he and his family are about to endure. But while you sneer at these poor shmoes who are practically being lead to a possibly awful fate like docile cattle, the movie takes care to remind you that you could very well be sneering at yourself as things go from unsettling to downright horrific.
As the horror aspects finally kick in fully, the movie essentially gives us such a bleak, sweat soaked final third, that it leaves you practically hollowed out like a canoe and the fact that a part of you hold the victims in contempt due to their own inaction just makes things all the more devastating. This isn’t a film you enjoy, there is no cheap, convenient catharsis at hand to tie everything up in a neat little bow – there is only pain, humiliation, death and a sinking sensation that Tafdrup has been playing you like a passive aggressive harp.
With that remake looming on the horizon courtesy of Blumhouse, it will interesting to see if the American studio can hold its nerve when it comes to that devastatingly down beat – but utterly necessary – ending, but even if it can, it’s going to be hard pressed to best an original that quietly revels in being as unsettling and uncomfortable as is humanly possible while riffing on things that are happening on the global stage right now.
With Patrick’s justification still ringing in our ears (“Because you let us.”) Maybe we’ll all be a little safer if we complained a little more when something legitimately harmed us…
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