"Stark and unsettling." "Depraved." "I never, ever want to see it again.
" So read the reviews of Christian Tafdrup’s Danish-Dutch production Speak No Evil (2022), a film so unflinching and unsparing it was immediately elevated (or should that be relegated?) to 'bleakest movies ever made' conversations alongside the likes of Salò, Requiem for a Dream , and Cannibal Holocaust. No English-language remake would ever have the cojones to match it, right? Tellingly, when it was announced that Blumhouse Productions would be cranking out a redo starring James McAvoy and Mackenzie Davis, the go-to comparison was the remake of George Sluizer’s suffocating Dutch horror The Vanishing (1988). That film, labelled by Stanley Kubrick as the scariest he’d seen, ended on a crushing note of nihilism, only for the 1993 remake to flip the talking-point, WTF, no-dear-God climax – some feat given Sluizer himself was back in the director’s chair.
So, Speak No Evil 2024. Does it sanitize? Dilute? Bottle it? No spoilers here, but let’s just say that what it does do is clever, walking a thin line between honouring the original, treading its own path to justify its existence, and offering some choicely brutal surprises. Yes, brutal – the remake is, after all, written and directed by James Watkins, and anyone who’s ever seen Eden Lake (2008) is not going to accuse him of wimping out.
The premise is much the same, only with the lion’s share of the action transposed from the Netherlands .