James Watkins’s remake of the Danish original is at its best when nothing happens: two families at a table, McAvoy pouring the wine, the Daltons too polite to leave. Once the film lets the knives out it becomes something more ordinary, and less frightening.
James Watkins has remade Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 Danish film closely, and hired James McAvoy to be the man you should not have said yes to. For eighty minutes it is a good, sour film about manners. Then it remembers it is a horror film, and gets worse.
Ben and Louise Dalton (Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis) meet Paddy (McAvoy), Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their silent son Ant (Dan Hough) on holiday, where Paddy is the sort of man who has befriended the whole hotel by Tuesday. Back home an invitation arrives, and a weekend at Paddy’s is agreed to, with their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) in tow. That is the whole plot, and Watkins, who also wrote it, knows it is enough.
McAvoy plays Paddy with a grin that arrives before the joke and stays after it, and a voice that drops when he wants something. He bullies a waiter, will not take no for an answer at dinner, and then apologises so completely that the apology becomes the next demand. What makes it frightening is that he is often right: the Daltons are timid, their marriage is threadbare, and Paddy is the only person at the table prepared to say so. We squirmed through that dinner, not from fear but from recognition. We have sat at that table, wanting to go, and said instead that we would love another glass.
Davis gives Louise the only working instincts in the house, and the film is largely about her being talked out of them, by her husband and by her own good manners. McNairy plays Ben with the soft, apologetic stoop of a man who agrees to things because disagreeing costs energy he no longer has. Franciosi’s Ciara laughs a beat after everyone else, which is a small thing and exactly the right small thing. Hough, given almost no words, does a great deal with a stare, and Lefler is convincing as a child who notices more than she says.
Tim Maurice-Jones shoots the holiday in warm late light and the house in flat grey daylight, so that the weekend looks like a Bank Holiday rather than a trap. James Price’s house has stone floors, low beams and too many doors, and someone is always standing in one of them. Keith Madden puts Paddy in open shirts and boots and the Daltons in soft neutral layers; you can tell from the clothes who owns the house. Jon Harris cuts the dinners slowly and holds on faces after the line has landed, which is where the discomfort lives. Saunder Jurriaans and Danny Bensi keep the score to low, held strings for most of the running time, which is the right call. Then they stop making it.
The last half hour takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that it belongs to a different and more familiar kind of film, with more running and more blood, and that it runs longer than the original’s ending did. Tafdrup’s close was quiet, cruel and hard to shake. Watkins’s is louder, and we had forgotten it by the time we reached the car. Somewhere in it we noticed we had relaxed, which is the wrong thing to feel in the last act of a horror film, and the wrong thing for a film that has spent eighty minutes showing us that every time the Daltons say yes to Paddy, somebody gets hurt.
Watkins’s Eden Lake (2008) took a couple into the English countryside and did not let them off, and it is still one of the nastier British horror films of its time. Speak No Evil has the better cast. It is also less frightening, and since Watkins wrote this one himself, the softening was his choice.
See it for McAvoy and for the dinners, ideally with someone who cannot say no to a second helping. If you have seen the Danish film, the first hour will feel familiar and the last half hour will not. It runs 110 minutes and carries a 15 certificate, and nobody in it says no when they should.
