This article is filled with Speak No Evil spoilers.
Fans of the 2022 Danish horror movie Speak No Evil cringed a little when they learned about an American remake from Blumhouse. After all, an American remake of a foreign film, especially a new one, usually signals a studio courting English speakers who are scared of subtitles. Furthermore, this always appeared doubly unnecessary since the original Speak No Evil is mostly in English (the two couples in that film are different nationalities and so communicate via English as their common tongue).
On the surface, the American version of Speak No Evil, written and directed by James Watkins, meets those fears. It shares a lot of basic plot points with the original, directed by Christian Tafdrup and co-written with his brother Mads, but does away with the Danish film’s bleak tone. Both movies involve two parents Bjørn/Ben (Morten Burian in 2022, Scoot McNairy in 2024) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch, Mackenzie Davis) and their young daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg, Alix West Lefler) on a vacation in Italy, where they meet another husband and wife, Patrick/Paddy (Fedja van Huêt/James McAvoy) and Karin/Ciara (Karina Smulders, Aisling Franciosi) and their silent son Abel/Ant (Marius Damslev/Dan Hough). The latter couple invites the former to visit them at their home for the weekend. The former agrees and stays, even when the latter’s hospitality grows aggressive and strange, leading to horrible revelations.
Despite those plot similarities, the two versions of Speak No Evil play out in very different ways, including through these major differences.
Nationalities and Norms
The most obvious difference between the two movies are the nationalities of the characters. In the Danish version, Bjørn and Louise are Danes while Patrick and Karin are Dutch. By contrast, the 2024 movie follows Americans Ben and Louise as they visit Brits Paddy and Ciara. More than just an attempt to appease the intended audience, the change in nationalities affects the movies’ central challenge, explaining why the visiting family stays, despite the hosts’ inappropriate behavior.
Bjørn and Louise don’t leave Patrick and Karin because of politeness. They don’t want to offend their hosts, even when their hosts offend them. Patrick and Karin sense this unease and use it to play on the sympathies of their intended victims. They even manage to get Bjørn and Louise to apologize for being offended.
Conversely, the American film leans into gender and political dynamics. McAvoy plays Paddy like a swaggering alpha male, the type of guy who takes Alex Jones and Andrew Tate as gospel. He keys into Ben’s insecurities, which stem from his inability to find employment and infidelity by Louise. Far more outspoken than her Danish counterpart, the American Louise is a good liberal, who stands up to Paddy throughout the movie, but backs down when Ciara challenges her for being implicitly intolerant, or worse enabling Paddy’s implied abuse.
This revision changes the meaning of the story’s big line. In both versions, when the hosts show their true colors, Bjørn/Ben asks why they’re doing this, to which Patrick/Paddy answers, “Because you let me.” In the Danish film, the visitors let the hosts kill them because they were too polite to say no. But in the American film, the hosts get away with it because Ben is too enamored with Paddy’s masculinity, and Louise is too worried about contradicting her political ideals.
Trouble at Home
As hinted above, Ben and Louise have deep-seated marital issues, which prompted them to go to Italy on vacation in the first place and erode their defenses when things get bad. McNairy plays Ben like the exaggerated soft liberal man ridiculed in right-wing media. He balls himself up and can barely raise his voice above a whisper. He guilts Louise into staying with him and moving to London, actions that leave her with deep resentment.
The Danish Bjørn and Louise do sometimes grouch at each other, but the contention is short and surface level. In fact, the camera often catches moments of intimacy between them, everything from sex to the two holding hands to comfort one another. In contrast, Ben and Louise don’t trust one another. Davis’ Louise is more forceful than Koch’s, and she makes her reservations known. But in every case, Ben emotionally browbeats her to get her to back off, in part because he thinks that he deserves indulgences from her and in part because he’s enamored with the virile Paddy. Ben wants to be Paddy and might even want to be with Paddy.
The road house scene best illustrates this distinction. In both movies, the hosts take the visitors to a small restaurant (a very grimy one in the Danish film), get drunk, and start fooling around with one another. But the Dutch antagonists in the original go no further than dancing and a bit of groping. In the American version, Ciara gets under the table and pretends(?) to fellate Paddy, who stares at Ben the entire time.
Sparing the Child
While the changes to the parents add richness to the American version that’s missing from the original, the revisions to the children soften the material, which is exactly what fans of the Danish film feared.
Watkins adds a few years to Ant and Agnes, making them closer to pre-teens than the eight or nine-year-old Abel and Agnes of the original. The younger kids play as more innocent victims, which is a big part of Tafdrup’s vision. Children are the ultimate victims, as underscored at the end of the Danish movie, which features a slow-motion montage of various children playing and enjoying time with their parents, unaware that Patrick and Karin are watching.
By aging up the kids, Watkins makes them more active in their resistance against the hosts. Throughout the American film, Ant tries to warn the visitors about what happened, even pantomiming the removal of his tongue early in the movie (as people who saw the endless trailers know). Ant finds ways of sneaking Agnes into rooms with evidence, finally getting her to understand the danger she’s in. With that knowledge, Agnes takes action, even stabbing herself to fake a period and get time alone with her mother.
With younger kids, Tafdrup can make his movie more shocking, which feels like his ultimate intention. As he slowly puts together the threat, Bjørn discovers Abel’s body floating in Patrick’s pool. At the end of the film, we see in close-up Agnes’s tongue being cut off, followed by a shot of her spewing blood from her mouth.
That said, the American movie does attempt to give a better explanation for one of the more unbelievable parts of the Danish film. Both movies have a scene in which the visitors sneak out in the middle of the night after discovering that the hosts have brought Agnes into their bed. And in both versions, the visitors turn around when Anges throws a fit about leaving behind her stuffed rabbit.
The Danish Agnes throws a fit because she’s little, which tracks, but it really strains incredulity that her parents would return to a dangerous situation because of a toy bunny. The American Agnes might be on the spectrum and breaks out into uncontrollable fits when she loses her comfort items. Furthermore, the bunny is a point of contention between Ben, who wants her to grow up and get over it, and Louise, who has a connection with her daughter to replace the one she’s lost with her husband. It’s a bad idea to go back in both movies, but the American movie adds some motivation to the decision while the Danish version seems driven by a need to get to the shocking reveal.
Flight or Fright Ending
The worst fears of the Danish movie’s fans come true in the finale of the American remake, which plays out in a very different manner. In the Danish version, Bjørn rousts his wife and child out of bed after discovering Abel’s body and evidence of the previous families killed by Patrick and Karin. Although Tafdrup indicates that they’re on the road for some time, even stopping for petrol, Bjørn never tells Louise what he’s found.
So Louise still finds her hosts annoying but not dangerous until it’s too late—which includes getting in Patrick’s car after theirs breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Afterward, Patrick and Karin drive their guests to a field, signal for their associate, and grab Agnes to cut off her tongue. The associate takes Agnes to another vehicle, while the hosts drive Bjørn and Louise to a quarry. They order the guests to remove their clothes, which Bjørn and Louise do, even though Patrick and Karin technically have no weapons to overtly threaten them with. They just go along with it. Then Patrick orders them to the bottom of the quarry where he and Karin stone to Danes to death.
In the American version, Agnes learns about the hosts through Ant and then tells her parents. The three try to escape without revealing to Paddy and Ciara what they know, which makes for a few tense sequences. However, once they realize that they cannot leave without taking Ant too, the Americans get captured by Paddy and Ciara, who get some help from an associate.
This leads to a series of thriller and action scenes, in which the visitors fight back against the hosts. By the end of the movie, Ben gets his manliness back, he and Louise work as a team, and the hosts get killed in the process. Agnes keeps her tongue and even Ant makes it out alive, albeit after smashing Paddy’s head with a brick, a bit of nod to the original’s stoning.
Tone and Taste
Really, the big difference between the two movies is a matter of tone.
The Danish version goes for creeping dread, which it achieves through its rich cinematography and bleak ending, even if it’s often undermined by putting a thematic point over believable character motivations or actions. The American version is all excessive trash, fueled by McAvoy’s delightfully unhinged performance and moments that play like cringe comedy instead of scares, but also has surprising character depth. Is that better than the watered-down and sanitized version that fans of the original feared from a remake? I would tell you, but I’ve got no tongue.
(Yes, it is much, much better.)
The Danish Speak No Evil is now streaming on Shudder. The American Speak No Evil is now in theaters.
The post Speak No Evil: The Differences Between the American Remake and Danish Original appeared first on Den of Geek.
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