Speak No Evil

A Danish family visits new Dutch friends for a weekend getaway in a remote cabin. It soon becomes the vacation from hell. Review.

In the end, Speak No Evil is a dark journey well worth the cost of admission. An escape attempt is made with just the hushed sounds of a hasty retreat as its sonic backdrop: the tread of feet, the click of a car door. The music that called to them is gone. The roaring instrumentals from Sune Kølster are a call to the wild unknown of the Netherlands, but also a warning. The soundscape of his ennui is a score that screams where he cannot. And since this is a horror movie, we know the answer will be grim, at best.

Shudder's controversial new horror Speak No Evil follows in the footsteps of Funny Games, but that is not necessarily a good thing for either movie.

Bjorn’s family dies because he isn’t tough enough to stand up to Patrick in the M Night Shyamalan-worthy twist ending of Speak No Evil, where the Dutch family’s cultural differences turn out to be a sham covering up a nefarious, far-fetched criminal enterprise. [The Shudder horror movie](https://screenrant.com/best-shudder-originals-movies-tv-shows-2021/) kicks the discomfort up a notch when Patrick verbally abuses Abel in front of Louise and Bjorn and watches Louise shower. The Speak No Evil ending sees a couple stoned to death and their child kidnapped and disfigured when the pair repeatedly refused to call out the increasingly discomfiting, weird, and inappropriate behavior of their new friends. In Speak No Evil, an upper-class family is brutally murdered for the crime of being too polite, a weirdly specific European horror trend with unpleasant implications. In fact, Speak No Evil could be compared to a string of successful European art horror movies, and that is not necessarily a good thing. [Speak No Evil](https://screenrant.com/tag/speak-no-evil/) posits pacifism and politeness as lethal flaws.

Absent of jump scares, supernatural elements, and most clichés that come with horror, Christian Tafdrup's Speak No Evil is more interested in the ways as.

And what I like about that is it’s not something that you are proud of or you don’t want to talk about it. But I was just looking at myself, looking at my friends, looking at something that I didn’t want to admit, and then tried to place it up on the screen. I believe in the audience and I want to give people a good experience, but sometimes it’s not enough just to please them. If we could just use a little bit of blood, a little bit of violence, but do it in a way that was so horrible that people would look away or still be disgusted after the film. I did three features and also some short films during many years and I think one of the main themes, without even really realizing, is that it’s a take on at least Scandinavian masculinity. And it’s very realistic and relatable and cynical in a way. And so, after that, my brother and I decided, what if we placed this idea in a horror genre and are we capable of doing the horror? I’ve always been in a way very social and I’m very used to small talk and I like to meet new people. So I think when we were actually on set shooting the scenes, we had worked such a long time with them that it wasn’t that difficult to shoot them. And that’s what I like sometimes: when it goes well, if you cast right, and you work so long for the script and you know what you want, it’s actually full of joy to shoot it. After that, we spent almost a year rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it. Absent of jump scares, supernatural elements, and most clichés that come with horror, Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil is more interested in the ways as humans we give the benefit of the doubt to others, despite a rotting malfeasance that may be lying under the surface.

What happens in Speak No Evil? The plot is simple enough. A couple, Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), and their daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg) ...

The first time Bjørn meets Patrick he asks to take the poolside chair next to him, and even though Bjørn's daughter is clearly using it — her stuff is still lying on it — Bjørn gives in to politeness and lets Patrick have it. They're getting used to the roles they plan to adopt after they've murdered Bjørn and Louise. Their modus operandi is to murder the parents, cut out the child's tongue so they can't say what's happened, take them on holiday, and then target another couple with a single child to continue the cycle. A couple, Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), and their daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg) go on holiday in Europe where they meet another couple, Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders), and their son Abel (Marius Damslev), who is unable to speak due to a congenitally short tongue. In a building separate to the main house, Bjørn discovers an attic room covered with holiday photographs. After the holiday Patrick and Karin invite Bjørn and Louise to their rural home in the Netherlands, they accept, and it all goes quickly downhill from there.

In an interview with Digital Trends, director Christian Tafdrup talks about his new Shudder horror film Speak No Evil.

I discovered in real life that I can say to people that I don’t want to be here anymore. I thought that was a very original and modern take on horror. And then I thought, if this really was not a comedy, what if it was a horror and really went to a very dark place? We want to be a part of the group. With Speak No Evil, we establish the setting very clearly and gradually: It takes place in a naturalistic house that any family could relate to or desire. As a result, the horror in Speak No Evil is more suspenseful and discomforting. It started out as an idea and then I wanted to give myself a challenge: The worst thing I could do was do a horror film because I’m not that experienced in that genre. And then I think in the second half, especially in the end, it often goes too crazy and wants to explain itself. Is it correct to describe Speak No Evil as a horror film about politeness? If you take Roman Polanski’s way of making horror or The Exorcist where you got a lot of relatable realism in it, you don’t just start out with seeing spinning heads and vomit-spitting demons. Because in the beginning, I thought this is a very typical idea for a comedy where you get some misunderstandings between couples. In an interview with Digital Trends, the film’s director, Christian Tafdrup, talks about the real-life inspiration for his movie, why he was drawn to the horror genre despite never having made one, and how he wants his film to make people a little bit more comfortable about speaking up in awkward social situations.