Speak No Evil

Speak No Evil is an excruciating experience, a film that comes on like an increasingly sour comedy of manners before, in its dying minutes, lurching into a state of pulverising nightmare. A Danish family meets their Dutch counterpart on a Tuscan holiday. Their connection is brief but vivid, the mousier Danes flattered by the attention heaped upon them by a garrulous doctor, his glamorous wife and their sullen, non-verbal child. So when an invite appears weeks later, beckoning the Danes to Holland for a short break, they happily accept. In constructing this relentless horror show, writer-director Christian Tafrdrup has built a film without any pressure release valves. There is no levity in Speak No Evil. No opportunity to reassess or dismiss the path we appear to be on. The viewer is never given any information or allowed to glimpse any situation that would assuage their most paranoid suspicions about these overfamiliar hosts. Quite the opposite in fact. Although Morten Burian's Bjørn is ill-equipped to do anything but smile passively through a sequence of events that are slipping further and further out of his control, we are acutely aware that the people escalating these trespasses cannot be sated. They, in actual fact, delight in their guest's twisting discomfort. Tension and anxiety are allowed free reign then, growing and swelling far beyond a point where you believe any real person would be wiling to suffer for the sake of appearances. Weakest in its backend, where a contrivance or two in terms of interfamily communication (or lack thereof) stretches credulity beyond breaking point, Speak No Evil still feels indelible simply in terms of how much venom it is able to summon up for characters who are themselves the victims of the most appalling outrages. It's not that Bjørn and Sidsel Siem Koch's Louise are bad people deserving of some transgressive comeuppance, it's that they are so weak-willed, so completely unable to do their job as parents, that inspires genuine loathing.