PLOT: 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.
REVIEW: Satire and horror can make a very great match and that becomes abundantly clear once again as you watch Christian Tafdrup’s, Speak No Evil. This is a smart psychological horror film that lulls you into a false sense of security because it begins one way and then descends into something darker and far more dangerous. Judging it from its most simple perspective, it makes a strong case for us to never trust first impressions. We’re all putting our best face forward and sometimes that is being done as a subtle form of manipulation. This is an uncomfortable piece of filmmaking but, like most horror films I’ve viewed for Sundance, it’s all about the journey making the payoff well worth the wait.
Just to show the audience that it will be playing with expectations, the film begins with a shot of a weaving road at night as the score builds with its twitchy plucked strings and a mounting sense of dread. From there, we are shifted to an idyllic pool on the grounds of a Tuscan holiday villa. This is where we meet a Danish couple named Bjørn and Louise (Morten Burian and Sidsel Siem Koch) who are vacationing in Tuscany with their young daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg). One day, while walking the city, they run into Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders), a dutch couple that is staying at the same hotel with their son Abel (Marius Damslev). The families hit it off during their encounter on vacation, so much so that, upon arriving back home, Bjørn and Louise are sent an invitation from Patrick and Karin to spend the weekend at their rural home in Holland. Louise finds the invite a little peculiar since they don’t really know these people all that well but she ignores that red flag feeling because what could possibly go wrong, right?
“What could possibly go wrong?” in a horror film is a recipe for horrific disaster and that proves to be the case in Speak No Evil. What director and co-writer Christian Tafdrup, along with fellow co-writer and brother Mads Tafdrup, do so well is that we’re never really given a fair warning as to what’s about to happen. It’s a slow burn but we have a sense that something just isn’t right. Patrick and Karin are warm and welcoming hosts at the start but Bjørn and Louise begin to be slowly taken aback by the difference between the fun couple they met in Tuscany and the deliberately cruel people that have lured them out to their remote home. A lot of fear is generated simply from the feeling that you are lost in a very unfamiliar place, something that was also explored in an effectively chilling way from another Sundance horror effort, Watcher.
The evil of the film unfolds slowly and plays things that way until it all boils over. The more time we spend with Patrick and Karin, the more we don’t trust them but, in the case of some clever writing, they guilt Bjørn and Louise to stay well beyond the point that most of us with common sense would. This aspect of the film may frustrate viewers who hate this aspect of the genre. You’re screaming at the screen for someone to call an end to this trip but it keeps going. This is just the nature of the sub-genre and even though WE wouldn’t continue to stay, we accept why Bjørn and Louise might.
Perhaps the most startling thing about Speak No Evil is that it is all set up in a comedy of manners. The film, despite slowly descending into something more horrific, is very funny and its script is in line with many comedies that make you cringe because of impossibly uncomfortable situations. The real fear here is putting your trust into people and then finding out they are not what they seem and they do not share your decency. Patrick and Karin lack empathy and they aren’t restrained by what most of us would call good behavior. They are completely unchecked and that’s what makes them dangerous. It’s what makes the almost uncomfortable interactions between the couples go from hilariously awkward to chillingly frightening within moments.
The acting is top-notch as both couples do a good job setting up their characters. As Bjørn and Louise, Morten Burian and Sidsel Siem Koch play gleefully naive a very well. As Patrick, Fedja van Huêt does a good job of coming off as fun and free-spirited until he suddenly isn’t. That charisma gradually turns into someone who is simmering with spite and he swings from one side to the next with ease. Karina Smulders strikes a similar chord as Karin and, as a pair, we get the impression that the couple has worked this little con on more than one occasion to earn the trust of unsuspecting people.
Speak No Evil grips you because its real-world relatable scenarios are frightening as they become excruciatingly more tense. It’s an intensely uncomfortable movie but it’s also a cautionary tale about putting your trust in the wrong people and also a taut exercise in anxiety-building dread that will make you think twice about the polite strangers you meet on your next vacation.