A Dutch vacation becomes a sinister social nightmare in the unsettling Shudder-bound thriller SpeakNoEvil.
Horror movies, even the very good ones, have a way of turning their audiences into backseat survivors: “Get out of the house already!” we scream at characters too stubborn or stupid to acknowledge the warning signs around them. It can be part of the communal fun of the genre, pleading aloud for the people on screen to get in touch with their self-preservation instincts.
To be fair, these fatally deferential Danes don’t necessarily have a reason to suspect that their lives are at risk. For all they know, the bad situation they’ve stumbled into deserves only discomfort, not fear. And that’s the ingenious, satirical design of Speak No Evil. This is more than a good horror movie. It’s a wickedly inspired and brutally effective one.
At this point, alarm bells will be going off in the heads of horror fans, especially given the swell of ominous music that accompanies these seemingly unthreatening early scenes. But Speak No Evil doesn’t tilt immediately into the torture-porn scenario one might expect. What it offers instead is a slowly escalating social nightmare: A long weekend with strangers that becomes a gauntlet of slights, gaslighting, and crossed lines.
One might think, during each grueling episode, of Ruben Östlund’s expertly calibrated cringe comedies, like Force Majeure and The Square. Writer-director Christian Tafdrup has a comparable talent for probing pressure points of class, gender, and domestic dissatisfaction. Among the numerous unspoken tensions underlying the film’s war of wills is the hint of trouble in paradise—the sense that Bjørn may not be entirely content with his life as a husband and father.
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