Comedy, nihilism and terror in Christian Tadfrup’s ‘Speak No Evil’
One of the most psychologically torturing films of the 2020s so far has been Christian Tadfrup’s horror thriller Speak No Evil, which he co-wrote alongside his brother, Mads. The plot tells of a Danish couple who meet their Dutch counterparts on holiday before being invited to spend a weekend with them at their countryside house with their respective children.
Tadfrup’s third film begins relatively light-heartedly, and it’s hard to say precisely how one ought to react to its first two acts. The Dutch Patrick and Karin live their lives in a starkly different manner to the Danish Bjørn and Louise, but seeing as they’re guests in their house, the Danes put up with the differences in the name of politeness.
There’s a passive-aggressive nature in the Dutch couple, who seemingly ignore Louise’s vegetarianism, swear in front of children, even abuse their son Abel, and drive under the influence of alcohol. All of this is admittedly irksome of the Danes, but again, they’re essentially forced to stay put and see out their stay rather than call Patrick and Karin out on their rather embarrassing behaviour.
There’s clearly an undertone of comedy in Speak No Evil in the classic sense of putting severely opposed people in a confined space with one another, but that humour is never quite afforded the opportunity to bubble over into the audience actually laughing out loud. That’s because the film, and particularly Patrick and Karin, hide a sinister secret.
Tadfrup had toyed with the idea of making his third film as a comedy, but he was more interested in daring to make a genre-defying movie, using elements of the horror, comedy and thriller genres in the same way that his fellow directors Bong Joon-ho and Michael Haneke are wont to do in the likes of Parasite and Funny Games.
During an interview with Roger Ebert, Tadfrup once noted: “For a long time, I wondered if it could be a comedy about couples and misunderstandings. But that was too easy. I like to place myself in deep water, with genres I’m not familiar with, and the last thing I thought I should do was dare to make a horror film.”
The social satire elements in Speak No Evil are there for all to see, but when Tadfrup threw in a sinister, dark and radical plot, he said it grew into something more meaningful and disturbing. He wanted to “disturb the audience instead of letting them go home feeling nice. To create a physical experience that stays in your body for weeks”.
And that’s surely the one thing that Speak No Evil undoubtedly accomplishes, creating a disturbing experience that haunts you long after the credits roll. After Patrick watches Bjørn and Louise have sex and has their daughter Agnes sleep in bed with him and Karin, the Danish parents decide enough is enough and leave the country house.
However, that awkward cringe-inducing comedy comes back strong again when they have to return to collect Agnes’ beloved bunny rabbit Ninus, leading to long silences and tense confessions. The relationship between the couple is healed somewhat after they come clean about what has annoyed them, and the prospect of an enjoyable weekend is suddenly looking more likely, for a short while.
But when Bjørn discovers that Patrick and Karin have a history of meeting couples on holiday, killing them and abducting their children before cutting their tongues out so they can’t tell anyone, he realises that he, Louise and Agnes, are next in line. Enter some of the most horrifying moments in 21st-century cinema – and cutting out Agnes’ tongue is not necessarily the worst of them.
After Patrick subjects Bjørn and Louise to their initial torture, Bjørn simply asks, “Why are you doing this to us?” and Patrick’s reply is one of the most sickening moments in recent memory. He affectlessly states, “Because you let me”. It’s a nihilistic juncture that genuinely sends shivers up your spine, not only because it reveals Patrick to be a psychopath but because it doesn’t quite make sense. We want to have reason and meaning for such sickening acts, but Patrick’s absence of one makes his cruelty all the more harrowing.
But most harrowing of all is the actual end of Bjørn and Karin, who are stoned to death naked in a quarry in true brutality before Agnes becomes Patrick and Karin’s new ‘child’. It’s nothing but cinema of the heaviest kind. The worst horror, though, is the fact that there is no supernatural means to the couple’s torture, no evil force other than a seemingly ordinary couple on the surface.
“I’ve discovered that many modern, civilised people are not used to evil — not in their everyday lives,” Tadfrup explained. “They don’t know how to react if they actually meet it. Perhaps they permit evil themselves and allow evil things to happen; they’re not fighting it or trusting their gut, so they let it happen for too long.”
And those words sum up Speak No Evil in general and particularly the motives and actions of Patrick. Indeed, Bjørn suffers because he lets him. Deep down, he knows that something is up, he knows that both he and Louise don’t actually like Patrick and Karin, but they persist in the name of social convention.
Our reaction to evil is to meet it with kindness, especially in those of us who are indeed kind. And that’s precisely what makes Speak No Evil so horrifying, the fact that we are wont to accept wrongdoing rather than confront it. In other words, we speak nothing against evil and perhaps even bring it to fruition through our inaction.
