Starring: James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, Aisling Franciosi, Alix West Lefler, Daniel Hough
OUR RATING: ★★★☆☆
Story: Psychological horror thriller remake written and directed by James Watkins. Speak No Evil (2024) centers on American family, Louise and Ben Dalton (Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy), who, along with their 11-year-old daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler), is invited to spend the weekend at the idyllic country estate of a charming British family, Paddy (James McAvoy), his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and their furtive, mute son Ant (Daniel Hough), they befriended on vacation. What begins as a dream holiday soon warps into a snarled psychological nightmare.
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Most Unsettling Speak No Evil Moments
Paddy: You know, technology’s advanced incredibly, but emotionally speaking, we’re all still just cave dwellers. It’s all this perfect life, Instagram, Facebook bulls**t. Everybody talking but nobody being honest. It’s left us, I don’t know, impatient and stressy.
Ben Dalton: Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Paddy: Too many people these days are afraid of honest debate. Aren’t they? We’re all too f***ing polite.
Paddy: “They f*** you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had. Then add some extra just for you. But they were f***ed up in their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats, that half the time were soppy-stern, and half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.”
Paddy: [referring to how long they’ve been married] Seventeen years.
Ciara: You get less for murder.
Paddy: What we can imagine is infinitely more sexy than what we can do.
Louise Dalton: You are so bitter at the world for not giving you what you think you deserve that you don’t see all the things in front of you.
Louise Dalton: I lost everything that makes me me, for you.
Louise Dalton: I don’t know if you’re with me because you love me or because you just can’t stand to fail.
Paddy: I’m increasingly finding the simple things in life bring you joy.
Louise Dalton: We can’t look stressed or scared. We just have to go out there and be completely normal, okay?
Agnes Dalton: We’ve been pretending it’s normal since we got here. This is so not normal.
Paddy: We believe honesty is the first step to fixing things.
Ben Dalton: Why are you doing this?
Paddy: Because you let us. You f***ing people. With your gas-free Teslas, and your line-caught tuna. Giving yourself a gold star because you made friends with a couple with a disabled kid. Makes me f***ing sick.