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Speak No Evil movie review: Just a couple of weeks ago, Blumhouse Productions came up with AfrAId, its maiden horror film in which Artificial Intelligence is the ghost. This week, Jason Blum and his production house also excavate the fear attached to something ordinary and augment it into a horror movie. However, unlike the previous attempt, they don’t turn the psychological horror into a borderline supernatural one, and stick to the beats of a sound escape thriller, much like its 2017 Jordan Peele success story, Get Out.
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Get Out for parenting
Just like that film, horrors and thrills stem from the cultural conflict between the guest and the host of a weekend getaway. In that case, they were the prospective white in-laws and the to-be Black son-in-law. Given Jordan’s direction, Get Out was far more incisive and politically urgent. Speak No Evil, on the other hand, is more grounded and universal. Both the guests and hosts are white families – but they’re divided by their lifestyle and parenting choices.
The Daltons are an aspirational, dysfunctional American family struggling to make a living in London, whereas Paddy and Ciara choose to live in the remote countryside, closer to nature and the Darwinian concept of food chain. Unlike the Daltons who pamper and lend false hopes to their daughter Agnes, Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara don’t pull any punches while parenting their disabled son Ant. They believe in roughing it out just like the animals they hunt, and keeping it real just like the weeds that surround their home.
No right way
As they say, there’s no rulebook to parenting. Paddy and Ciara urge their guests to be more honest about their feelings – hurt, disappointment, fear, concern, shame, guilt, and anger – towards their daughter, just like they are towards their son. Paddy even argues with Louise Dalton that even though she’s a vegetarian because she supports sustainability, she still eats fish. Not that it’s explicitly pointed out, but there aren’t too many vegetarians or vegans fighting for fish rights, like they do for animal rights, merely because fish remain invisible under the sea and don’t have a voice – literally.
The lack of voice is a character in Speak No Evil. Whether it’s the Daltons who suffer silently in their respective corners or the condition of Ant who can’t speak because of a naturally shorter tongue, stifling of voice seems like a constant threat lurking around. But are Paddy and Ciara, who never waste a chance to voice out their opinions or reservations, really the most sorted, liberated souls out there? Or are they also hiding something under their unvarnished veneers? For instance, how does Paddy drive a fancy car (rather rashly) when he supports a carbon-neutral way of being?
Horror of hypocrisy
The hypocrisy extends to the Daltons too – with the idea to protect their daughter, they often end up isolating her. Dolls, which have been grossly exploited in horror films as supernatural devices, are sources of comfort for Agnes, who finds a respite in her animal-shaped doll from her parents’ unhappy marriage. Despite the clash in parenting styles, that of Paddy and Ciara starts to close in on you. You get their point, but not their harsh demeanour. They’ve had a tough childhood and parenthood of their own – but does that justify their own aggressive parenting style?
James McAvoy is gradually turning into a horror veteran after M Night Shyamalan’s Glass and Split, and Andy Muschietti’s It: Chapter Two. In Speak No Evil, his arc is diabolically delectable – that one raised eyebrow from an earlier scene or a few seconds’ longer stare from a past sequence come back to haunt you when he begins to unravel. His muscular silhouette and his alpha streak juxtaposed against the other guy’s rather timid demeanour makes him all the more menacing.
Facing their fears as a family together helps the Daltons to think on the feet, turn resourceful and use the unfamiliar setting to their advantage. We know screentime doesn’t exactly help a child growing up, but a deep breathing tutorial device comes quite handy for the Daltons while escaping. So does the ability to think like their predators. For the one fact that both parents and predators often miss out on, is how much their kids and prey pick up from them subconsciously – only to use that to rebel against them even further.
