James McAvoy and Mackenzie Davis star in a film directed by James Watkins that takes time to hit its stride, but is always entertaining.
The film centres on an American couple, Louise and Ben Dalton (Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) who go on vacation with their daughter to Italy, and whilst there, meet a British couple who are also on holiday with their son. The Brits are Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and the families become friendly with one another and connect over the daughter Agnes being shy, having panic attacks and being overly attached to her cuddly toy beyond what they feel she should for her age, and the son, Ant, who due to an underdeveloped tongue has communication issues.
The English couple invite the Americans to come and stay with them for a weekend following the end of the holiday, and it’s at this stage the Americans start to notice that all is not as nice as it seems with the Brits.
I can say that I quite enjoyed the film, and whilst I can’t really say there was much that I didn’t like, my gut tells me that the film wasn’t perfect.
I have to imagine that these days, filmmakers and studios expect that most people who go to see most films will have already seen the trailers, and have a sense of what you’re going to see. If you hadn’t seen the trailer, you’ll certainly have seen the title which is Speak No Evil.
Either of these should be an indicator that all is not going to be as it seems when the film shows James McAvoy and his wife as such a friendly and welcoming pair. The problem I have, is the film took way too long for it to get past the stage where we suspected that there was something amiss, and actually onto the story of what happens when the Americans realise something is amiss.
The film gives a few subtle hints that the Brits say or do things that don’t sit well with the Americans, and in particular with Mackenzie Davis, and then it has a few scenes where they uncomfortably cross lines and it’s blatantly obvious that there’s soon going to be an explosion and total breakdown of niceties. For me, I honestly can’t tell if the film was trying to be subtle, because it was incredibly obvious that we were just waiting for the moment when things turn bad and the true plot would emerge.
If you were to edit out the few subtle clues (that weren’t super subtle) the film would be about an hour give or take of a slightly overbearing British couple having their American friends over to visit. I just feel there needed to be more than just this long build of showing them spending time together and there being the odd uncomfortable moment where the Brits cross boundaries.
And this brings me to my other issue with the film. As you’ll know if you’ve seen it, the big reveal is that the Brits aren’t actually the parents of the child they claim to be their son, and that they have kidnapped him from another family who they have killed, and probably robbed. The reveal also shows that they have repeated this pattern a few times and always seem to keep the previous family’s child as their own and presumably eventually get rid of them so they get a new kid.
I’m actually not sure from the plot as it unfolded if their motivation was to have a new kid, as it had been said that Ciara had had a child who died at twelve weeks, but this may have been a lie. So, it could be that they were searching for the perfect kid to be in their family, or that they were using the child as a way to get other families to drop their guard so they could rob and kill them. Then use the new kid for a while until they got too old to fight back or run away.
My issue is that if all the niceties by Paddy and Ciara were just a rouse to trick the American couple into going to their secluded farm house where they could rob them and take their daughter as their own…why not just on with it? And why come across as the perfect hosts for 90% of the time and be overbearing or confrontational for the other 10%?
The only reason I can think that Paddy and Ciara would have played nicely when the Brits first arrived at the farm house would be so they could take a little time to make sure that they haven’t told anyone where they are going. And the Brits also did enough weird behavior that the Americans literally ran away in the middle of the night, and would have got away completely if the daughter hadn’t forgotten her cuddly bunny rabbit.
But there in came the mid film tease and heightened moment before things went calmer. Louise found her daughter asleep in the bed with the British couple and whisks her out and the Americans go to leave as this majorly crossed a line. But when they returned, the Brits were able to convince the Americans that they had got things wrong and that Ciara only took the girl into her bed to comfort her when she was having a panic attack.
The film did a good job to normalise things again here for a while before they then heated up into the big reveal that Paddy and Ciara are in fact bad and that there was no coming back from it to re-establish the illusion. But again, what was Paddy’s plan?
We can assume that maybe the Brits intended to kill the Americans and take the daughter during the course of that weekend, but like I said, there was nothing to show that they were making sure that their presence there was unknown to anyone else. It’d feel less plausible that the Brits intended to carry on with the rouse across multiple visits as there is more chance of a paper trail that would lead back to them if they disappeared.
Films like this still play heavily on the basis that people go to secluded places in the countryside where there’s no phone or internet signal, and that the potential victims won’t have told any friends or family where they were going. Paddy and Ciara do say their intention was to create the illusion that they had just moved house after their disappearance, but they do this in the same scene where the Paddy drains the American’s money from their account. Maybe this was going to some kind of secret account, but in terms of the Americans going missing, it would be found within seconds of their being reported missing that all their funds when walkabouts on this date, and so the paper trail would begin.
The film reminded me in ways of the Kurt Russell film Breakdown, but unlike this, Breakdown gets straight to the point with the lead character working out that something majorly wrong is going on. Speak No Evil does get really good when all the cards are on the table, but I wonder how enjoyable it would be for repeat viewings once you know where everything is leading to, but that it takes so long to get there.
I can imagine this would be a great film to watch a second time and look for even more clues that you perhaps didn’t need to look for the first time. But I also think the best way to enjoy this for repeat viewings would be to watch it with someone else who hasn’t seen it at all yet. That way you’d be able to look for their reactions as they piece together what is happening.
The title of the film only really seems to relate to the son Ant, who it gives the shocking reveal that to keep him silent they cut out his tongue. There’s no indication if the Brits do this with all the children or just this one. Maybe it’s based on a book of the same title or something, but the title does give away a bit too much for a film that spends most of its run time teasing out a secret.
All the performances are good and McAvoy comes across and intense and a formidable force despite him having not seemed to be the biggest guy in movies in the past. His physique is even bigger than he achieved for Split and Glass, and he has just the right balance between over confident pub guy and psycho killer.
I did feel that the balance between Ben and Louise was slightly off. She always came off as more capable than he did, and this would be fine, other than that Ben’s story throughout was that he felt betrayed and inadequate following that she was texting some other man and heading towards an affair. It felt like he needed to do more to re-establish himself as a man and husband and father, but by the end, I still felt like why she would have strayed from him.
The ending of the film leaves the final word with the mute kid, as he caves in the head of McAvoy. This is both shocking, as literally they have a child brutally kill the villain, but also feels appropriate as he had been the one most wronged by Paddy and Ciara with his misisng tongue and parents having been killed.
Conclusion
This was an enjoyable film, but one that could have taken less time to get to it’s point which everyone and their tongueless child could have guessed.
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