The ‘Speak No Evil’ Remake’s Ending Might be Better than the Original
There’s this running gag in my family every time it’s my turn to curate movie night. If I pick a French or Korean film, even a Swedish or German one, everyone knows to buckle in for a downer of an ending. The international horror ending rule isn’t immutable, though without the commercial constraints of domestic releases, those movies, more regularly than not, see themselves through to their natural, distressing end. Christian Tafdrup’s original Danish (though mostly spoken in English) 2022 Sundance shocker Speak No Evil is presently in the zeitgeist for just that reason. That movie’s ending is grim stuff, and when word broke that Blumhouse would be remaking the film (just two years later) for a broader English audience, the conversation naturally shifted toward whether the remake would retain the savagery of the original or neuter it for bigger box office bucks. The answer, in a sense, is both.
Tafdrup’s vicious foray into liberal niceness and the polite bourgeois arrived at the most shocking, yet natural, end for its leads, parents Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch). Aggregate slights over a weekend away with new couple Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders) never amount to any sense of urgency, even as the situation grows more dire. When Bjørn discovers the body of the other couple’s ostensible son, Abel (Marius Damslev) drowned in the pool, he withholds that information from his family, principally worried about how it would make him look, of all things.
Speak No Evil’s ending, then, was plenty evil. Never pushing back, Bjørn and Lousie first watch their daughter, Agnes (Liva Forsberg) have her tongue cut out, presumably to take the place of Patrick and Karin’s new fake child. They are then stripped bare, thrust into a ditch, and stoned to death. That’s a downer of an ending if there ever was one, with Patrick even echoing 2008 The Strangers sentiments when asked why he’s doing this to them. “Because you let me,” he mutters, matter-of-factly.
James Watkins, director of the fantastic Eden Lake (and the less fantastic The Woman in Black) knows a thing or two about early aughts savagery. His style was a natural fit for the remake, even if, now that his Speak No Evil has been released, the original ending is nowhere to be seen. The Blumhouse variant is a successful retread of the original’s social slights and communicative discomfort up until the third act. Nihilism is replaced by Straw Dogs lite. American couple Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben (Scoot McNairy) are trapped. Their tormentors, serial murderers Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi, fantastic in this year’s Stopmotion), are prepared to kill them. Enter Chekov’s boxcutter.
Louise, a perennial final girl through the end, successfully throws the room into chaos, allowing just enough time for her, Ben, their daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), and the kidnapped kid, Ant (Dan Hough) to flee. They’re just about to get out when neighbor, Mike (Kris Hitchen) arrives, gun in hand. The four barricade themselves in the house (hence the Straw Dogs reference) and must contend with their savage pursuers if they intend to make it out alive.
Broadly, the pivot is more cathartic and more audience-friendly. Intentionally, Watkins and Tafdrup mounted painful, suffocating tension. Every weird interaction—be it a disregard for diet or simulated sex under a dinner table—was met with audible groans and laughs from the audience. We know, in the safety of the theater, that what we’re seeing is wrong. It’s that distinct horror sense of “I know better,” the overarching feeling that we, as audience, are built differently. In my screening, I heard hushed whispers from the row below me, “I’d already be out of there.”
All of us, in some sense, thought the same. My personal line in the remake’s sand? When Louise and Ben find a moist stain on the bed they’ve been given to sleep in. Ideally, that’s my cue to leave. Time to make up some kind of excuse and get the Hell out of there. But, both Speak No Evil and the original are movies, embellished with caricatures of modern liberal guilt, but grounded enough to resonate uncomfortably. We think we’d be out, but we’ve been in that position before. We’ve all endured some social discomfort for the sake of harmony. To save face, we’ve jeopardized our bodies.
Tafdrup’s original ending encapsulates the futility of social cache. Money and status alone aren’t enough to inoculate even the most polite, well-intentioned among us from the evil in the world. Worse, in many ways, that same privilege is an invitation, a conspicuous target the longer one prioritizes one’s own ego over an intrinsic drive to preserve. After all, politeness isn’t often benevolence. The alleged intent is the feelings of the other, though really, it’s meant to preserve the feelings of the self. Never mind how Paddy and Ciara would respond, Louise and Ben (especially) are concerned with how they would look if they absconded in the night.
Yet, in their Speak No Evil, they fight back. Doing so leads to an ending that, in its own way, is no less grim, no less nihilistic than the original. The American ending is certainly less gruesome—no severed tongues here—and both Louise and Ben survive. Interestingly, however, that survival is predicated not on an equal distribution of fighting back, but Louise’s strength, and hers alone.
In shifting the setting and accents, Watkins, rather than probing a distinctly Danish sense of politeness, instead applies a broader, deeper American lens, particularly as it applies to Ben’s masculinity and Agnes’ role as their daughter. To start with Ben, my theater audience all but conceptualized the movie as the emasculation of Scoot McNairy. Cinematic emasculation can be regressive, and is regularly a tool to bolster the same toxic masculinity it intends to dismantle. But here, that masculinity is distinctly tethered to the realm of the nuclear family, namely Ben’s insistence that he’s capable of keeping his family safe.
Little is known about his own parents. McAvoy does get a chilling monologue about how our parents destroy us, and Ben’s visage suggests more than he ever textually lets on. But his swagger is one of Father Knows Best, the dad who needs to be a dad, the husband who needs to be the husband. He wants to be the pinnacle of the nuclear structure that keeps his family safe.
Agnes, for her role, is regularly aware of just how menacing their weekend hosts are. She is met with incredulity from her parents every time she endeavors to share the strange goings-on she’s witnessed. Mom and Dad, it’s not normal that Ant is covered in scars and bruises, right? Plagued with an undefined behavioral condition, Agnes regularly suffers from panic attacks and bouts of scratching. The thematic is rendered real. In this world, Agnes lives not just with a panic disorder, but an existential one. Her parents, a cultural kind of protective barrier for time immemorial, are incapable of keeping her safe. Speak No Evil never gestures toward gun violence in schools, for instance, though the undercurrent of burgeoning violence and the erosion of safe spaces for children is evident in Agnes’ enduring anxiety.
And it’s in that finale that Ciara, Louise, and Agnes are given the most to do. Louise, for her part, is responsible for downing both Mike and Ciara. Late in the film, as Ben hobbles to grab a ladder away from his family, that same audience member from before whispered, “Good, the kids are safe because they’re with her.” There is no catharsis for Ben, no winning moment. His one ostensible chance almost ends with his face impaled on a mirror. He charges from a closet toward Mike and is immediately overpowered. Louise, hammer in hand, saves the day.
And it’s Agnes at the end that finally puts an end to Paddy. Gun to her head, she’s learned that Mom and Dad (mostly Dad) are superficial protectors, cultural facsimiles of what parents should be, but no match for the harsh realities of the real world. To stay safe, she needs to protect herself. She jams a ketamine syringe into Paddy’s leg, and while Ben has an opportunity to end it there, he leaves it to Ant who gets a little smashy with a nearby rock.
While the remake’s ending lacks the gore of the original, it simultaneously lacks the finality. While it’s chilling to see the Danish leads stoned to death, it’s no less chilling to see this American family drive off. There’s finality in death. Watkins, cruelly, allows them to live. To live with their guilt. To live with the recognition that they’re incapable of keeping one another safe. And for Ben especially, to live with the gnawing truth that his masculinity was a charade—all masculinity is. The fortress he built for himself, Capital D Dad, has fallen apart. His family doesn’t need him. He tried. He failed.
Agnes’ parents put her into this mess, and she had to pull herself out. Ant, no doubt reeling with considerable trauma, has nothing and no one. Certainly not this family. There’s a cruelty in letting them live. While it’s not quite as viscerally unflinching, it nonetheless makes for a thematically rich, super downer of an ending. While Speak No Evil pulled some of its punches, when the credits rolled, I had a hard time deciding which fate would be worse.
Categorized:Editorials
