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| A boy with a wide open mouth, encased in darkness, makes up this striking poster for Christian Tafdrup's Speak No Evil |
A big-city couple from Denmark receive an invitation by snail-mail from a couple from Holland that they met on holiday months earlier and decide to take them up on their offer and drive South with their daughter for a long weekend at their house.
Speak No Evil is written by Mads Tafdrup (Yes No Maybe (2019, TV-series)) and his brother, co-writer/director, great Danish filmmaker Christian Tafdrup (Parents/Forældre (2016)).
Tafdrup moves ahead in the same waters as his first films, Parents and En Frygtelig Kvinde (2017), with another film about gender power dynamics today and a young modern couple with relationship dysfunction, a male that seems castrated into modern submission and a female who on some level longs for a different type of man. This time the familiar dilemmas are put up against a Dutch couple who are the Danish couple's opposites; very old-fashioned, unrestricted by inhibitions and very politically incorrect.
This is quite funny for a long time, as issues around diet, child-raising, smoking, drinking and more are effectively skirted by the conflict-averse Danes, as their unwillingness to look straight at the human behavior of their hosts and draw some sensible consequences from them push them from one awkward situation to another, - and eventually all the way into the shark's mouth. Great cinematography (by Erik Molberg Hansen (Becoming Astrid/Unga Astrid (2018))) and a bombastically foreboding score (by Sune Kølster (Parents))) leave us with no doubt as to the sudden turn into horror that is bound to occur in Speak No Evil. SPOILER There are creepy, earlier scenes of near-invasion, feeling of immediate danger and threat of violence, and then the horrific scene with the child that is invoked on the poster above, which all help set the unnerving tone.
The upbeat good time I had with the film lasted long, anyway, due to the fact that the dark social satire lasts long, and you have ample room to slap your forehead at the dispositions of the dysfunctional Danes here, SPOILER as they fail to heed the warnings and thus doom themselves - with some justification?
The performances from the unknown quartet of adults are very good: Morten Burian (Sons of Denmark/Danmarks Sønner (2019)) and Sidsel Siem Koch (Hvidstengruppen II - De Efterladte (2022)) play the troubled couple with exposed nerves, and Fedja van Huêt (Soof 2 (2016)) and Karina Smulders (Alle Tijd (2011)) are strong and eventually chilling as the disturbing Dutchmen.
Speak No Evil turns very dark and very gruesome in its conclusion, which mixes Old-Testamental religious symbolism into a truly wicked, horrific ending that only sets this serving of blackness further apart. Speak No Evil speaks loudly enough.
Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: 3.2 mil. $
Box office: 1.7 mil. $
= Huge flop (returned 0.53 times its cost)
[Speak No Evil premiered 21 January (Sundance Film Festival) and runs 105 minutes. Shooting took place in Denmark, Holland and Italy. The film has sold 68k tickets in Denmark to date, coming to around 7.5 mil. DKK, approximately 1.08 mil. $ (63.5 % of the total gross). The film's 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Poland with 246k $ (14.5 %) and Netherlands with 195k $ (11.5 %). Tafdrup does not have his next gig announced yet. Burian returns in Loving Adults (2022); Koch returned in Hvidstengruppen II - De Efterladte (2022). Speak No Evil is fresh at 79 % with a 7.10/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Speak No Evil?
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