Critics Have Seen Speak No Evil, And They Can’t Keep Quiet About James McAvoy’s Performance

So, Speak No Evil 2024. Does it sanitize? Dilute? Bottle it? No spoilers here, but let’s just say that what it does do is clever, walking a thin line between honouring the original, treading its own path to justify its existence, and offering some choicely brutal surprises. Yes, brutal – the remake is, after all, written and directed by James Watkins, and anyone who’s ever seen Eden Lake (2008) is not going to accuse him of wimping out.

Speak No Evil joins the ranks of the rare Americanized horror remakes that get it right. Instead of rehashing the same story beat by beat, Watkins — armed with a stellar ensemble cast led by a career-best James McAvoy — takes the central conflict of the original and explores how couples from different cultures would react under the same circumstances. The result is an assault of relentless tension and the best possible outcome for an Americanized remake.

The film’s slow-burn pace is an asset, not a flaw. Speak No Evil works best when it focuses on the Americans’ escalating fears, and collapses near the end when the psychological horror story turns into a predictable potboiler. But for a good three-quarters of the way, this Blumhouse production is an entertainingly elevated genre piece.

This version of Speak No Evil, despite an effectively creepy performance from James McAvoy, grinds the unsettling contours of the original into gory, Straw Dogs-lite, home-invasion comeuppance pulp in a last act that’s exactly the sort of dragged-out predictable material [Christian Tafdrup, the writer and director of the original] sought to avoid. Even a captivatingly unnerved Mackenzie Davis, here married to a feckless shell of a man played by Scoot McNairy, and the commanding The Nightingale actress Aisling Franciosi in her first major studio turn, can’t rescue this Speak No Evil from its own impulse toward placating the audience with a happy-ish ending that’s a far cry from the stones thrown in the final, harrowingly deflating scene of the original.