Original Speak No Evil director was not impressed by the remake

Alex Proyas, director of the 1994 version of The Crow, made it very clear that he wasn’t happy about the existence of this year’s The Crow reboot – and now Christian Tafdrup, director of the 2022 Danish film Gæsterne, a.k.a. Speak No Evil (read our review HERE) has followed in Proyas’s footsteps, revealing that he was not impressed by the recently released American remake of his film (you can read our 8/10 review of the remake HERE), even though he received an executive producer credit on the film.

James Watkins, whose previous credits include Eden Lake and The Woman in Black, wrote and directed the remake, which centers on a family who takes a dream holiday to an idyllic country house, only to have the vacation turn into a psychological nightmare. Tafdrup’s version of the story, which he wrote with his brother Mads Tafdrup, had the following synopsis: A Danish family visits a Dutch family they met on a holiday. What was supposed to be an idyllic weekend slowly starts unraveling as the Danes try to stay polite in the face of unpleasantness.

Speaking on the Danish radio show Kulturen, Christian Tafdrup said (with thanks to World of Reel for the translated transcription), “I don’t know what it is about Americans, but they are brought up for a heroic tale, where the good must win over the bad, and this version of the film cultivates that. … When I saw the film, I could see that they would never succeed with a film where the characters are stoned to death, as they do in our film. These people [in the U.S. version] must fight for their family and defeat the bad guys […] It is a kind of happy ending, and it is so deep in their culture that America must be able to handle it all.” He added that the changes Watkins made to the story and characters made the remake seem less dangerous than the original, more sanitized. Audience members seeing the remake “were completely over-enthusiastic and clapped, laughed and whooped. It was like being at a rock concert,” a very different experience from watching the original. He said, “People left my film traumatized.“

The remake was made on a budget of $15 million and, after one week in release, has earned over $24 million at the global box office, so it seems the changes that were made are paying off to some degree.

Blumhouse founder Jason Blum produced the Speak No Evil remake. Christian Tafdrup was credited as executive producer alongside Paul Ritchie, Jacob Jarek, and Bea Sequeira. The cast includes James McAvoy (Split), Mackenzie Davis (Terminator: Dark Fate), Scoot McNairy (Monsters), Aisling Franciosi (Stopmotion), and Alix West Lefler (The Good Nurse).

Have you seen either version of Speak No Evil? What did you think of them? Let us know by leaving a comment below.