By Sandra Hall
Speak No Evil ★★★
(MA15+) 110 minutes
The horror movie’s ability to get serious is not news. After all, Godzilla was spawned by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the genre’s essential nature is exploitative. It sets out to give you a fright because it can. The art of the cheap thrill is written into its DNA.
James McEvoy in a scene from Speak No Evil.Credit: AP
These thoughts came to mind while I was watching Speak No Evil, a clever but nauseating frightener about the consequences of remaining silent in the face of rampant domestic abuse.
The perpetrator of the abuse is James McAvoy’s Paddy, a boisterous Englishman whom an American family meets while enjoying a summer holiday at a plush European resort. At first, Louise Dalton (Mackenzie Davis) and her husband, Ben (Scoot McNairy) are a little wary of Paddy, who’s travelling with his wife, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and young son, Ant (Dan Hough), but Paddy’s overtures are hard to resist and Ben is habitually polite. “No” is a word he’ll avoid if he possibly can.
But he’s also depressed because he’s out of a job, and back in rainy London, he talks a reluctant Louise into accepting Paddy’s invitation to spend a weekend at the family’s house in the country. Once they’re there, Ant and the Daltons’ daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), develop a bond even though Ant suffers from some sort of condition that has robbed him of speech.
For its first hour or so, the film passes itself off as a biliously mordant comedy of manners, following the same narrative line as the 2022 Danish movie on which it’s based. Buzzing with manic energy, a grinning McAvoy threatens to drown the spineless Ben in false bonhomie while dreaming up new ways of taunting him with macho displays of bad behaviour. Everything becomes a contest to the increasing irritation of Louise, who plays a much more decisive role here than she does in the Danish original.
L-R: Alix West Lefler, from left, Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis.Credit: AP
She wants to leave soon after they arrive and eventually, pushed beyond endurance, persuades Ben to pack up and sneak off in the middle of the night. But Agnes’s beloved stuffed rabbit is left behind in the rush and she won’t be consoled until they go back and retrieve it. It’s a hackneyed plot device but we’re in so far by this point that the suspension of disbelief is no stretch at all.
The film does have something forceful to say about domestic abuse. The best scene is also the simplest. The two kids have been working on a dance routine that they perform for the adults but they have hardly begun before Paddy is roaring at Ant for getting out of step. He does it repeatedly with such savagery that the other adults are stunned into silence when they should be yelling at him to stop.
It’s a moment so powerful that nothing more is needed to get the message across but the film’s British director, James Watkins, is a seasoned horror movie practitioner and he isn’t going to stop there. He takes a much more explicit approach to the story’s violence than the Danish version and Louise and the children move to centre stage as the action ramps up, as does the bloodletting, to gruesome effect.
The whole thing involves a calculated degree of sadism which reminded me that a horror movie with moral pretensions can be much nastier – for the wrong reasons – than an honest old fright fest with nothing more ambitious in mind than having you jump out of your seat.
Speak No Evil is released in cinemas on September 12.
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