Speak No Evil, the new remake of Christian Tafdrup's Danish chiller, may only be releasing two years later than its predecessor but, in reality, it's been a long time coming.
Writer-director James Watkins had been trying to pin down the perfect collaboration with Blumhouse for 16 years before a link to the 2022 film landed in his inbox – and changed everything. "[We'd] been in conversation for a while, really – since I made a film called Eden Lake," he tells 12DOVE of the horror production company. "Every now and then we'd check in and be like, 'What about this? What about that?' But it was always like, 'Nah'. Then they sent Christian's film, and said, 'Well, let's take a look at this. See what you think...'"
The movie, which stunned genre fans when it landed on Shudder, centers on Bjørn (Morten Burian), Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), and their daughter Agnes, who strike up a fast friendship with a Dutch couple while holidaying in Tuscany, Italy. A few weeks later, the pair, now back home, receive an invitation from their new pals to come and visit for a weekend, which they eventually accept.
Upon arrival, though, their hosts Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders) become increasingly passive aggressive, with the former blatantly disregarding Louise's vegetarianism and verbally abusing their mute son Abel. Before long, a desperately uncomfortable Louise begs Bjørn to leave, and well, without spoiling the film's conclusion, things really escalate from there...
"I looked at it, and I thought, 'Wow, this is…' I mean, it was strong, you know,” Watkins laughs. "It was unrelenting and brutal and brilliant. I started thinking about the themes, the characters, and if I could transpose it all. That was actually key, and my first conversation with them; bringing this into an English world. It was like, 'Listen, if you want to do this in America and it's New Yorkers go to Virginia, I don't know how to write that. I don't know those people. It's going to be secondhand. It's going to be a bit generic.'
"The cliche might be that the Brits are oppressed and the Americans are outspoken, but that's not necessarily been my experience. There are lots of Americans, East Coast Americans particularly, who are quite uptight, so I kind of thought, 'Okay, I can do that, then I can lean into lots of things; landscape, mythology, that kind of English humor'. I knew I could explore those themes and dig into them a bit deeper."
In Watkins' version, James McAvoy plays Paddy Feld, a larger-than-life doctor from the West Country, who welcomes expats Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise Dalton (Mackenzie Davis) to his family's farmyard home after meeting them on vacation. For those who have seen the original, it won't come as a shock to learn that the new flick concludes in a different way to the source material, but there are other differences, too: Paddy's volatile emotionality, for example, as well as his and his wife Ciara's (Aisling Franciosi) dark backstories.
"There's a conversation with Straw Dogs at the end," Watkins says, when we suggest that his take plays out like a home invasion movie in reverse, putting an interesting spin on how Bjørn and Louise were so hellbent on escaping Patrick and Karin's twisted, metaphorical cage. "But before that, I was looking at Michael Haneke and Ruben Östlund and Mike White with The White Lotus, that kind of queasy dramedy of social interaction. I suppose, the horror of everyday life and how we all try to negotiate it. There's horror enough in that, you could almost not have the whole underlying story. That fascinated me."
Speak No Evil releases in UK cinemas on September 12, and in US theaters the following day. For more, check out our list of the best horror movies of all time, or our guide to the most exciting upcoming horror movies heading our way.
