James McAvoy goes into full creep mode as a monster hiding behind a friendly face
Speak No Evil
Starring James McAvoy, McKenzie Davis, Aisling Franciosi & Scoot McNairy
Directed by James Thomas Watkins
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Sept. 13
James McAvoy is a very versatile actor who’s been in dozens of TV shows, plays and movies since the 1990s. But he seems to have a special knack for masked malevolence, like the creepiness and coiled, rip-roaring craziness of his characters in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2016) and its follow-up, Glass (2019). In this psychological horror thriller, he’s Paddy, a crudely boisterous Brit who lives off the grid in the scenic rural countryside, loves hunting and bemoans the conveniences and lifestyle choices of the modern world.
When Paddy and his wife, Ciari (Aisling Franciosi from Game of Thrones), meet a more refined, citified London couple, Louise (MacKenzie Davis, who starred in AMC’s Halt & Catch Fire) and her milquetoast husband Ben (Scoot McNairy), on a vacation in Italy, they all become tentative friends. But something seems a bit off right from the start, and it starts feeling even more off after Paddy invites Ben, Louise and their preteen daughter (Alix West Lefler, who plays Genevieve on TV’s Fire Country) to visit them at his rural home.
Alix West Lefler, MacKenzie Davis & Scoot McNairy play a London family whose countryside holiday turns into a nightmare.
Paddy and Ciari also have a young child, a boy named Ant (newcomer Dan Hough) who is unable to communicate beyond moans and mumbles. Ant’s “condition”—and don’t worry, you’ll find out more about it—gives the movie its title. But it also refers to how Ben and Laura try to act polite and mannered and not complain, speaking no evil as their pastoral retreat starts to go off the rails, before Paddy’s mounting transgressions and bothersome behaviors build to shocking revelations and a bloody fight for their lives against a sadistic psychopath.
Director James Watkins certainly knows how to tighten down the screws in a horror movie, as he did in Eden Lake (2008) and The Woman in Black (2012). In this remake of a 2022 Danish film of the same title, he remains faithful to the devilish dread of the original but gives it some new violently nasty tweaks at the end, and that’s all I’ll tell you about that.
The movie is spiritual kin to Straw Dogs, Get Out, Funny Games and other flicks that use normalcy as the jumping-off spot before deep-diving into something much darker, disturbing and deviant. One of the things I liked about Speak No Evil is how it’s not a “slasher” flick; it’s more subtle than that. The terrors at its core worm their way into our awareness without a need to see them. That might disappoint some gorehounds, attracted to the film’s BlumHouse production banner, but just knowing—and leaving some details to the murky recesses of the imagination—is supremely unsettling and jarringly nerve-wracking.
Beneath its surface, it touches on toxic masculinity, marital discord, motherhood, feminine empowerment, lost childhood and parenting, with a modern-world nod to classic Old World fairy tales about the dangers lurking in deep forests full of trolls, witches and demons. And it’s certainly a cautionary tale about stranger danger—and the twisted intentions that might be hiding behind a friendly face.
And for sure, you’ll never again hear The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame” the same again after you hear it hijacked by Paddy, a monster whose initially friendly smile becomes a scowling grimace of unspeakable acts in a real house of horrors. Speak No Evil and James McAvoy work hard to get under your skin, and they certainly come through loud and clear.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 