Speak No Evil

Sundance 2022: Speak No Evil Review

Speak No Evil is a brilliant take on the cinematic stranger danger horror trope. The Danish film is creepy, haunting, disturbing, and destined to stay with you well after the screen fades to black.

Bjørn (Morten Burian), Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), and their daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg) are on vacation in beautiful Tuscany and befriend a Dutch family holidaying in the same villa. A couple months after their trip, Bjørn receives a postcard from Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders) inviting them to their home in rural Holland for the weekend.

At first hesitant, Bjørn and Louise eventually decide to take the 8-hour road trip from Copenhagen with their daughter. “What’s the worst that can happen?”, Louise jokes with their friends before departing. Never has there been a more foreboding question in a horror film.

After arriving in Holland, the Danes quickly become uncomfortable with Patrick, Karin, and their son Abel’s (Marius Damslev) home life. Bound by the pressure of polite society, Bjørn and Louise find it difficult to leave prematurely. Soon they discover their Dutch vacation mates aren’t entirely as they seem.

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Director Christian Tafdrup has created not just a terrifying film that will have your shoulders up around your ears, but an incredibly nuanced story. Co-written with his brother Mads Tafdrup, the two explore masculinity, political correctness, and the guilt of discontentment.

Bjørn has the most interesting character arc of the four adults by far. Throughout the runtime we see him take on the guise of hero, express his dissatisfaction with his paint-by-numbers life, and become a man broken by his ability, as a husband and father, to protect his family. And Burian plays each of these notes brilliantly.

The rest of the cast rounds things out perfectly. Siem Koch is a great balance to Burian’s Bjørn — when he’s up, she’s down, and when he’s unsure, she’s reassuring. As for the Dutch, Smulders and van Huêt take creepy to a new, magnificent level; always leaving audiences uneasy with their true intentions until the very end.

A common thread throughout is the debilitating nature of courtesy. Bjørn and Louise are not held captive nor are they coerced into visiting Holland. At any given point, they are able to leave. The only thing keeping them there is their fear of offending, which also prevents them from clearly seeing the imminent danger. The connection to current society, especially its online discourse, is a clear and damning indictment.

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Overall, Speak No Evil is an effective and tight horror film. Tafdrup smartly presents well-known tropes in a satirical fashion, lending unexpected moments of dark levity to the film too. There’s also a tense score, resonating sound design, and an eerily and beautifully-shot rural Holland, to build a world of prickly terror.

This is Tafdrup’s first foray into horror, but here’s hoping it isn’t his last. The genre has certainly seen a positive shift in the last decade and, along with the Ari Asters and Jordan Peeles of the world, Christian Tafdrup certainly deserves a seat at the table.

Speak No Evil is screening as part of Sundance 2022. Head here for more of this year’s festival content.



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