Watkins, James

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    How ‘Speak No Evil’ Starring James McAvoy Differs From the Original

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    The 2022 original retains its chilling power thanks to a worldview that the new version seems unwilling to embrace.Warning: Spoilers ahead.No movie haunts me more than “Speak No Evil.”Not the version starring James McAvoy that’s currently in theaters, but the Danish original from 2022 (streaming on Shudder and Hoopla). That film’s Danish title translates to “The Guests,” which feels more apt than the English name: It’s about an ordinary offer of hospitality that goes horribly, horribly wrong.In the original formulation, written by the brothers Mads and Christian Tafdrup, its director, two couples meet on vacation in the Italian countryside. Bjorn and Louise and their school-age daughter, Agnes, are Danish. Patrick and Karin are Dutch; their son, Abel, is around Agnes’s age, though he seems nonverbal. The families hit it off, and months later, the Dutch invite the Danes to spend a weekend at their rural home. Almost immediately, things feel strange.The genius of the original “Speak No Evil” — and, to an extent, the remake — lies in how it keeps the audience on edge. Most of the tension involves trying to decide whether Patrick is lacking the more buttoned-up Danes’ sense of social niceties or is actually a violent psychopath. Patrick and Karin’s offers of food, for instance, can be read as generous or menacing. Is this a horror film, or just a really, really dark comedy about cultural differences? The filmmakers make us second-guess our reactions to every image, word and action, exactly the way Bjorn and Louise do in their hosts’ home.For a long stretch of the new “Speak No Evil,” directed by James Watkins, the plot matches the original more or less, but the visitors are Americans living abroad (played by Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) and the hosts are British (played by Aisling Franciosi and McAvoy). The couples share meals, including one at a local roadhouse that becomes uncomfortable when the wine loosens everyone up and the conversation turns inappropriate. One night, Louise wakes to discover that her daughter is in the other couple’s bed. The guests try to flee based on a bad feeling, but are then drawn back because their daughter cannot find her favorite stuffed bunny.By the end, the hosts are actively trying to murder their guests, who have realized their game: They meet families on vacation, invite them to visit, then murder the parents, steal their child and cut out their tongue. In both movies, when Ben/Bjorn asks Patrick/Paddy why he’s doing this, the response is the same: “Because you let me.”From left, Alix West Lefler, Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis in the new film, which more or less matches the original until the end.Susie Allnutt/Universal Pictures and Blumhouse, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Speak No Evil’ Review: He Seemed So Nice

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      In this horror remake, James McAvoy plays an aggressively friendly British stranger who extends a dubious invitation to an American couple. Suckers!Given the travel horror stories that fill the news — cruise-ship contagion, passengers trying to open plane doors mid-flight — the movies have some serious competition when it comes to fear mongering. Yet filmmakers keep trying to top reality with familiar stories about the terrors that await you when you venture into the world. Characters keep heading down dark roads. They visit weird hotels and isolated cabins (come on!), invite creeps into their homes and enter those of people they scarcely know (as if!). These travelers don’t ask for trouble; they beg for it.The first time that Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben (Scoot McNairy), an American couple, really notice Paddy (an exhaustingly over-the-top James McAvoy), he’s taking a splashy leap in a pool. They’re on vacation in Tuscany and having a good time, and meeting new people is fun (unless you’re in a horror movie, that is). Paddy seems excitable, a bit over-eager — for attention, certainly — but he and his wife, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), are friendly, attractive and British, so they’re easy to talk to. Like Louise and Ben, they have a boy, Ant (Dan Hough), so they must be nice. They’re like us, you can almost hear Louise and Ben thinking.For reasons that never make any sense — rationality is often in short supply in horror cinema — it isn’t long before Louise and Ben take up Paddy and Ciara’s invitation to visit them at their house in the English countryside. First, though, the writer-director James Watkins stirs up some marital tension for Ben and Louise, who have moved to London, upturning their lives. (Davis and McNairy starred in the great AMC show “Halt and Catch Fire,” and are persuasively cozy together.) She seems to be just fine, but Ben is unhappily unemployed, a divide that Watkins also uses to feed the story’s themes, chiefly masculinity and middle-class norms.Red alarms have already begun blinking by the time that Louise and Ben and their 11-year-old daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), an anxious child who self-soothes with a stuffed bunny, pull up to Paddy and Ciara’s house one portentously dark night. Once inside, the alarms start flashing faster. Louise tries to put on a good game face, but she’s visibly put off by the house, an uncomfortable, ramshackle warren of cluttered rooms with low ceilings that boxes them in. Soon, Paddy is slaughtering a goose (uh-oh) and pushing a forkful of cooked bird at Louise — a vegetarian — and the atmosphere has appreciably soured. Things only get worse because they have to.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More