Speak no Evil
European Straw Dogs, meets The Shining.
A young American city couple with a child visit some Italian small town (filmed in Croatia, natch), just broadening their horizons. It’s the classic cloistered child too naïve for her age, the overly sensitive mother, and absolute wet blanket of a father. They meet other English speakers, another couple with a similar age range, but they are much cooler, particularly cool dad Mr. Tumnus.
Almost the first time they meet, their child rides on the cool dad’s Vespa bike, just speeding around the cobbled streets like a maniac. They have lunch together and share the first life stories: the protagonist couple moved to London from America because the father was supposed to be a big shot, but turned out he was just a failure and is living of severance pay until he finds another job. The woman just tagged along like a housewife, losing her PR job.
The cool couple are different: they live in some rural UK farm, the wife takes care of her disabled child and our cool dad is a doctor working with MSF, healing the poor and sick. The protagonist couple in not only strictly less cool, they do shittier jobs, and are overall boring middle class wet blankets, instead of the charismatic bombshell of their pals. They accept their invitation to spend a long weekend on their farm when they are all back in the UK.
The wife is not very enthusiastic, but the husband just got another rejection letter, so why the hell not? What’s the worst it can happen in some rural cottage? Well, the first hard job is finding the damn place, they can’t follow directions for shit. The house looks bigger on the outside, so the kids will sleep together in the attic, and our sheltered flower of a kid will have to make do on the floor.
They drove a Tesla there, so of course the woman is a vegetarian, but as they get there the hosts announce they slew their golden goose for them, our protagonist doesn’t have the guts to say no to the best cut of the deceased bird (but she spits it out afterwards, for some reason). This and other small micro-aggressions continue through their stay, but our protagonist continuously deploy their conflict avoidance skills to take larger and larger amounts of shit from the charismatic dude.
The host kid’s disability is some gobbledegook about tongue sizes, he’s like the parrot pirate from Pirates of the Caribbean. He tries to communicate something to his counterpart, but she can’t understand him very well, another minus from her sheltered upbringing. They don’t have much free time to understand each other anyway.
In their room, we have a nasty fight between the protagonist couple, where we find out the woman sexted some dude and even received a dick pick in the past. The host guy appears to be listening in this private conversation, this will come up later. During the night, the wife checks up on her kid and eventually finds her sleeping on the host’s bed with their own kid, this crosses the line. They escape in the wee hours and just drive away, that is completely unacceptable.
Alas, the kid doesn’t have her special bunny so they have to turn back and face the music. The host woman makes up some sob story about being raised in foster care and not knowing that could be misconstrued, so even after giant amounts of red flags, they are persuaded to have another lunch. Incredible charisma.
On that lunch, what starts as some kids doing a dance routine of Cotton Eyed Joe (yes, the 90s hit), turns into a screaming match, with the host kid flailing about and getting verbal violence evolving into actual violence. The kid cannot follow a rhythm, I thought these hyper-masculine dudes hated theatre kids? Shouldn’t he be glad he’s no poofter?
Anyway, that’s probably the wine talking, so it is decided they will take a long nap and then they get away from this nightmare. The protagonists don’t leave because the host woman tells another sob story about how he gets violent if they leave before he wakes up again. Meanwhile, the kid snatches a special kid and shows the protagonist kid what these fuckers do with strangers: steal all their money and murder them, keeping the kid for the next honey trap.
The protagonist kid has to think on her feet and pretends her first period has come up to make them leave ASAP. Then there’s the business with the stuffed rabbit on the root. They drive away, but get captures when the host kid is thrown into a lake to drown.
They are properly kidnapped then forced to dump their sizeable bank account, but mama bear fends off the charismatic slasher, and they haul ass to the cottage, where gunfire is exchanged, goofy Molotov Cocktails are thrown, but they manage to fend off the attackers with some injuries.
As the charismatic dude lays on the ground sedated and the woman and the outside friend dead, the newly crowned alpha dad doesn’t do the mercy kill. The host kid, which turns out is the child of the previous dead couple without his tongue, does mash the attacker’s face with a brick, to glee from the dead guy even, the cycle of toxic masculinity and violence seems to remain.
But on the car ride home, the kid of pretty calm until the kid gives him her doll, as he burst into tears. Maybe there’s a way to break the cycle with love, something he did not experience much until now.
By the second lunch, I was expecting a twist where the protagonist were the arrogant pricks, and the hosts were tactless country bumpkins. Could as well be tweaked to lead to the opposite message.
This might as well have a higher cosmopolitrometer meter than Straw Dogs, since it involves kids. This is a Blumhouse film, probably better than most. I went in based on Mackenzie Davis being in it, and she’s a good actor, but maybe she’s too off the beaten path doing the meek mother, usually she is the rebel outsider. The other dude from Halt and Catch Fire is a better fit for wet blanket bore. On the other hand, McAvoy hits it out of the park as the charismatic flannel shirt dude, it’s clearly within his comfort zone.
That scene where both dads go to the hill to scream into the void reminded me that McAvoy is probably some upper class dude while the American might be some regular Joe, but they play opposite characters. But no, it’s actually the correct way around: Scoot had a ranch, while James is a semi-orphaned working class guy.
There are also nods to this being a remake. The tongueless kid writes a plea for help but the other kid thinks it was gibberish, but it might be Danish. And Cotton Eyed Joe, a classic eurodance tune from Scandinavia.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.