Speak No Evil is the sort of film where one can thrust upon it all manner of horrific hyperbole; the sickest film of the year, the most unsettling film I’ve ever seen, the most terrifying film of the millennia! Well of course Speak No Evil is not that, that would be absurd. But is it one of the more shocking and unsettling feature films I personally have seen this year? Most definitely. I am too someone who doesn’t shock easily. Yet this work is a piece not only of pitch black comedy, but also one of incredible depth, whilst also indeed having a truly shocking and unnerving finale. Speak No Evil is phenomenal and will stay with you for many days after, whether you want it to or not.

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This wonderful Shudder original horror-drama come psychological thriller is the exact sort of worst case scenario / from hell movie that works on a formula well-known to us at this point, that of the family on holiday who unbeknownst to them will soon face terrible horrors. Of course, this takes that to a whole new level with its timeless focus on the great horror of most human interaction; politeness. This is a film that at multiple horridly cringe-inducing points allows its parents and child to leave the situation that will undoubtedly grow into horror, our writer and director here Christian Tafdrup gleefully continues to place his characters in crossroads positions where options to leave or options to stay are both readily available. Perhaps the best way to describe the film is if the darkest of cringe-comedies eventually took a terrifying turn. Tafdrup as a director here is incredibly adept at balancing his tones, before eventually wholly letting the horror and intensity swallow the story from underneath our characters feet. Sequences are incredibly well conceived and delivered and overall as a piece of construction, the whole film doesn’t have an ounce of fat on it. It’s lean, tense, indeed darkly comic and ultimately horrifying. Written by its director, co-writing with Mads Tafdrup, the screenplay for the film is as aforementioned at once a comedy of social manners and at other times a deeply disturbed psychological thriller. These things should not pair so well, but here conceived by Tafdrup as an ever-spiralling snowball of events, the film takes on an almost tragic quality regarding its consequences. Despite the inherent lack of justice in the events themselves.

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The film at its core works as triumphantly as it does due to four central phenomenal lead performances, with two sublime child performances in the mix also. The central couple of the film played by Morton Burian and Sisdel Siem Koch are so wonderfully realistic and dramatically unnerving as the piece continues, whilst also balancing that chief human politeness that makes the film the film it is that one does indeed go along with every single horrid revelation and shift. Burian and Koch are terrific in the film and only bested performatively by their counterparts with real-life married couple Fredja Van Huet and Karina Smulders playing the other couple, who without spoiling too much are indeed the instigators of the horror of the film. Smulders is more to the side of things, but is no less brilliant, but Huet is the chief instigator and is the lead persuader and cunning charmer who leads our couple down the path that will lead to the horrifying finale. All in all these four performances are all so very well delivered and realistic that the film has its horror boosted ten-fold by the grit and realism of it all. The film can’t help but get devastatingly under your skin and as I have already said, it is has remained with me already for some time and is something I have already spent multiple nights thinking over. These nights will continue, Speak No Evil aims for your marrow and lands it’s blows deftly.

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A truly shocking 9/10 that has stuck with me now for days. It’s quartet of performances are all terrific, it’s writing and direction is very well handled and overall one can’t get away from a finale that will shock you to your core. However this is a film more than it’s unsettling finale, the first hour and ten minutes leading up to it are just as dramatic and unnerving and tense, whilst also being frequently funny. True, this tar-black comedy at it’s darkest, but it’s still enough to get a horrid awkward laugh here and there. Before indeed succumbing to some truly tragic and wonderfully dark horrors. Tafdrup as a film-maker here relishes in not pulling his punches. The film is almost refreshingly horrifying.  

P.S. Not to get snobby about things, but who would have thought that perhaps the best of all streaming service originals this year would be from Shudder. In many ways of course this may very well be the thing that leads to this film failing to get the audience it deserves. But then again on the other hand, the audience for this film is the sort of people that already have Shudder, me included of course in this. I very much doubt this would play well on somebody’s Amazon Prime mid-week date night and if it does, marry that person and never let them go, or for that matter get out while you still can.

-       - Thomas Carruthers