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| Courtesy of Shudder |
The Great Danes know the ins and outs of transgressive
unrelenting heavy-duty horror that perhaps sees further into the pit than the
devil himself, whether it be Carl Theodor Dreyer’s witch burnings in The
Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan
or more recently Lars Von Trier’s Satanic-provocation Antichrist and
Nicolas Winding Refn’s neon-dripping fashion Hellscape The Neon Demon. While world horror of all shapes and sizes
including but not limited to French, Japanese and South Korean horror manages
to manifest somewhere in the recesses of our most deeply seated nightmares, it
seems to be the Scandinavians who traverse above and beyond measures of
intimate cruelties that mean to scar and leave you bleeding out for some time
after the end credits roll.
The latest foray into that Danish desire to viciously shock
while twisting the knife is Christian Tafdrup (Parents; A Horrible
Woman) in his third feature Speak No Evil, a vacation thriller
picked up by Shudder that grows steadily mean and mad as it bores on. Centering on a Danish couple, Bjørn (Morten
Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) who are vacationing in Tuscany with their
little girl Agnes (Liva Forsberg) watching an elite opera concert when they
bump into Dutch couple Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders) and
their mute son Abel (Marius Damslev) suffering from congenital aglossia. Weeks later, Bjørn and Louise receive an invitation
from the Dutch family to come spend a weekend getaway in their secluded rural
home in the Netherlands which they eagerly accept, wanting an out from the
doldrums of city life.
Upon arrival however, a number of things are amiss about these
new “friends” and their way of life with peculiar methods of child rearing
including but not limited to abusive anger directed at Abel and Patrick
deliberately serving meat dinner cuisines against Louise’s veganism. In almost every conceivable way, the Dutch
couple casually gradually oversteps its boundaries with the Danish couple, starting
out small with aberrant passive-aggressive provocations to steadily more bizarre
and frightening actions that soon devolves into a kind of cat and mouse game. All the while, Bjørn
and Louise find themselves trying desperately to return home yet as the “gracious”
Dutch couple’s unacceptable behavior grows more sinister all they know how to
respond with is accommodation and concession.
Easily the cruelest and most shocking Danish horror film
since the aforementioned Von Trier spats in the face, Speak No Evil is a
horror film about depraved monsters lurking in the real world who come to us as
friends wanting to host a reprieve from the pressures of regular life only to sneakily
dig their claws in. Much like the other
Danish enfant-terrible, the film shows no cowardice towards depicting violence
towards minors as it proceeds towards its devastating finale without compromise,
aided by powerful performances from its ensemble cast. Sort of like the extreme version of John G.
Avildsen’s Neighbors stripped free of its jet-black comedy, its a satire
of bad table manners and etiquette about how easily we’re willing to concede in
the face of passive-aggression and dangerous threats.
Much has been made among horror fans of the Danish couple
being dumb characters making foolish decisions to advance the story forward,
with more than a few red flags waved about plain as day that any rational
person would perceive to be a warning sign.
But Speak No Evil isn’t about strong willed people but how
predators can size up, draw out and eventually corner weaker prey giving in to
submission out of their own fears and weaknesses. The horror comes not from the transgressions being
inflicted upon this couple so much as it is about the tendency of good morally
upstanding citizens to lay down before their captors and allow it to happen.
Visually Speak No Evil is breathtakingly ornate, vast
as well as intimate with tight close-ups of dinner table conversations lensed
by Erik Molberg Hansen interspersed with wide vistas of the Danish countryside. There’s also a few notable callouts to
Kubrick’s The Shining involving aerial shots of the couple driving
through the desolate woods to the isolated cabin. The orchestral score by Sune
"Køter" Kølster evokes everything from The Shining and its
Wendy Carlos rendered electronica to subtle violin strumming that makes the
hair stand on end. Sound wise Speak
No Evil is pretty terrifying and only seems to distantly hint at the extreme
horrors ahead.
Morten Burian and Sidsel Siem Koch make the Danish couple at
once vulnerable and unassuming with Burian being something of a nebbish while
Koch finds herself feeling more and more threatened by her hosts. Fedja van Huêt is dangerously charismatic
when we first meet him and even as his behavior grows more perversely creepy he
still manages to charm an arm around his prey’s shoulder and keep the couple
from up and leaving. Still the real star
of this shock fest is writer-director Christian Tafdrup who co-written by his brother
Mads has fashioned the hardest, meanest, nastiest Danish horror film in recent
memory, an effective cinematic sucker punch to the gut followed by a kick in the
groin.
Released theatrically in Europe while garnering a limited
release in the United States followed by Shudder Streaming, Speak No Evil is
not for the faint hearted whatsoever. A
film about how a friend can actually be a foe, how quickly we roll over for
said “friends” bad behavior and about how easy it is to rip the script of
social manners up and prey on the weak willed. Its transgressions and fearlessness of violating the audience's trust will invariably make or break the film for some viewers.
Uncompromising to the core with no real way out but through, Speak No
Evil reinforces the Great Danes as the dark lords of the film horror
underworld willing to take you beneath the ninth circle and back up until we
realize the worst parts of Hell are already present in the real world. This won’t be easy for most people to deal
with and likely won’t be the kind of horror fans will return to for second
helpings. But if you really want to be
shattered into a million pieces by the demonic forces lurking in seemingly
ordinary people, Speak No Evil will fulfill that prophecy.
--Andrew Kotwicki
