Mark Reviews Movies: SPEAK NO EVIL (2022)

Speak No Evil, IFC Films/Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 8, 2022

Menacing horns blare beneath the fairly mundane scene of a car driving down a dirt road at night. That's the opening shot of Speak No Evil, a film of such relative ordinariness and made up so much of subtle social cues that director Christian Tafdrup does have to announce that something is horribly amiss from the start. What's shocking—and, oh, does this film shock to the core by the time it reveals its twisted, grotesque, and diabolically cynical point—is how none of the narrative clues and filmmaking signals can truly prepare us for how Tafdrup fulfills the inherent promise made by the ominous score at the film's beginning. This is a merciless horror tale.

That it doesn't seem at all like one for a while makes it even more distressing. The screenplay, written by the director and his brother Mads Tafdrup, borders on the territory of a comedy of manners for a long stretch. It's about two families, both of whom seem relatively similar save for a couple of distinctions, such as nationality and occupation and the gender of the sole child in each family unit. Those little differences matter, and the joke is how much they happen to matter to one family.

Well, the real joke is how the one family seems to go out of their way to ignore or downplay or excuse how much those differences genuinely bother them. On one side, we have Danish husband and wife Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), as well as their young daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg). They're on vacation in Italy, enjoying a comfortable and idyllic resort somewhere in the countryside.

On the other side, there's another family: Patrick and his wife Karin, played by real-life husband-and-wife actors Fedja van Huêtt and Karina Smulders. They have come to the same resort from Holland with their young son Abel (Marius Damslev).

In retrospect, it's notable how the Tafdrups establish at least one component of Patrick and Karin right from the start. They arrive at the resort in the middle of the night, hence the dark drive that opens the story. The next evening at dinner, Patrick stops to apologize to and thank the guests gathered at the large dinner table for knocking on so many of their doors the previous night. He and his wife simply couldn't remember which room was theirs, and everyone smiles and chuckles away what must have been a most irritating, if momentary, inconvenience to their sleep. We'll grin and laugh our way through most annoyance and discomfort, especially if it doesn't affect us at all or for long, won't we?

Anyway, the two families start talking as the vacation progresses (Thinking of why Patrick first notices Bjørn, as his eyes well with tears during a singing performance that night, takes on a different insinuation by the finale). They get to know each other—that Louise is a vegetarian, which Patrick finds noble enough to point out that he's a doctor who has done humanitarian work. They joke that the Danish and the Dutch have a lot in common culturally—including a shared frustration with the Swedish. Their kids seem to get along, too, so after returning home, it's a pleasant surprise—for Bjørn, at least—when the family receives a photo from their vacation friends.

The Dutch family has invited the Danish one to stay the weekend at their home in the country. Despite Louise's hesitation of spending so much time with relative strangers, Bjørn manages to convince his wife. If nothing else, it would be rude to reject such a kind gesture.

It would be too easy to reduce a description of this material to some familiar clichés about kindness and/or strangers (One's mind will go to adages of very different tenors at various points here). That's the case, to be sure, but the Tafdrups' screenplay is more pointed about how these characters interact—what they do, either by choice or by accident, and how they react or don't react to real or perceived slights of varying degrees of severity.

Take, for example, how Patrick greets the family's guests—after giving them a tour of some cramped quarters that has Louise speaking in hushed Danish so that her hosts can't understand her—with the promise of a big dinner. The dinner, as it turns out, is wild boar that he has prepared. Now, we have to consider a couple of possibilities: Is Patrick, who made such a big deal about her vegetarianism, messing with Louise, or was his initial admiration just the phony display of someone who actually doesn't care about what other people have to say?

To some extent, it's important. More vital to the point, though, is how Louise remains silent, smiles, and takes a bite of the pork. It would be impolite to dismiss such generosity and hard work, after all.

The rest of the story continues playing with these amusing dilemmas of customs and manners. Well, they're comedic at first, at least, because the offenses are so minor, the polite dismissal or acceptance of them is so reflexive, and, while the whole affair is uncomfortable, it's so mundane, too.

As screenwriters, the Tafdrups are smart and incisive in the way they escalate these affronts—going from matters of diet to ones of invading personal space, voyeurism, and springing a complete stranger on Bjørn and Louise as a babysitter for their daughter—so that each new step becomes increasingly discomforting. As a director, Tafdrup has a firm command of maintaining a tone of uncertainty (Is there something going on with the Dutch family, or is the Danish couple, as Patrick finally suggests when they consider leaving, just more prejudiced than they'd care to admit?), while gradually raising the volume of the sinister underpinnings until it matches—and then surpasses—that of those ominous horns on the soundtrack.

Nothing else about the story of Speak No Evil should be revealed, of course. Even mentioning some specifics of the performances, which are great across the board and particularly how the tonal consistency of a couple of them is a major reason the third act works so well at doing what it does, might give away too much. It is fair to iterate that this ultimately is a horror story, and the real terror is in its inevitability—not because of what certain characters decide to do, but because others feel obligated to say and do nothing at all.

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