Warning: Spoilers ahead
AN AMERICAN remake of the Danish film Speak No Evil (2022) directed by Christian Tafdrup, has been released with a new ending starring James McAvoy and directed by James Watkins. Film reviewer Mark Kermode and other esteemed reviewers suggest this new ending works well. It doesn’t. It misses the point by a dark country mile.
In the original, a middle class doctor and wife with a disabled son befriend a sweet Danish couple and their young daughter during a holiday in lovely Tuscany. Come and visit us in our cosy Dutch home, doctor couple suggest – with an achingly middle class offer of ‘wine, food and long walks’. Who could refuse? Not the friendly Danes who think it might be rude.
So, the friendly Danes go and discover they are not like them one bit and spend the first two acts raising their eyebrows in a comedy of manners style when – plot twist – they are in never-seen-before horror territory with the daughter’s experience being blow-you-away, Hereditary level, grotesque. And the little Dutch boy doesn’t do great either.
Reviewers of the film have talked a lot about its themes of parenting and social niceties. They see a plot involving people who fake-respect the couple’s values, force their customs onto them, including their diet and parenting styles, whilst the comedy of manners duo suck it up in the name of politeness. They grow more tense but brush aside their concerns – until the horror kicks in.
When the Danes realise they are in serial killing territory, they try to escape but it’s too late. They end up compliant and being stoned to death in Adam and Eve nakedness, their daughter mutilated and silenced and then carted off by Muhajid, the friendly babysitter for whom the couple had reservations but didn’t like to admit. When they finally, at moment of death, bleat ‘why are you doing this to us’, the response by the irrational, psycho, Alpha dad is ‘Because you let me’.
It doesn’t take a film student to find an alternative allegory to parenting styles or social awkwardness. It’s more a film about experiencing uncomfortable differences but feeling forced to comply with customs because it is expected. It’s a film that uses stoning and mutilation. It’s a film about respecting other’s traditions, until the tradition involves taking the daughter. It’s a film about a medieval danger being visited on a modern and well-intentioned, but naive couple who ignore a primitive fear in favour of social acceptability. It’s a film about fear of upsetting people who turn out aren’t just wanting you to accept differences or change you but are actively wanting to destroy you.
Sound familiar?
The sweet Danish family would much prefer the new ending in the new release. In 2024, the Danes are now Americans. Americans who hold back politely on sharing their thoughts loudly and openly. Americans who don’t say ‘hey I’m having a thought and I’m going to share it’. But genuine Americans they are, because they neutralise the threat, save the child and go home. There’s no unpleasant mutilation, no stoning and no Muhajid accomplice. The new accomplice is now Mike who, happily,is toast. The horror was just a possibility. These baddies don’t win. No compliant deaths here. The Americans don’t ‘let them’.
In the original film, in a picture of domestic loveliness, the father changes the ending of a bedtime story of a Grimm fairy tale to a happy one to protect his young child. The writers of this new version do the same for us.
Speak no evil, indeed.
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Image of Speak No Evil marketing courtesy of Universal Pictures.
