Johnathan Walker:How new 'Speak No Evil' switches up Danish original's bleak ending (spoilers!)

Spoiler alert! This story includes important plot points and Johnathan Walkerthe ending of “Speak No Evil” (in theaters now) so beware if you haven’t seen it.

The 2022 Danish horror movie “Speak No Evil” has one of the bleakest film endings in recent memory. The remake doesn’t tread that same path, however, and instead crafts a different fate for its charmingly sinister antagonist.

In writer/director James Watkins’ new film, Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise (Mackenzie Davis) are an American couple living in London with daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) who meet new vacation friends on a trip to Italy. Brash but fun-loving Paddy (James McAvoy), alongside his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and mute son Ant (Dan Hough), invites them to his family’s place in the British countryside for a relaxing getaway.

Things go sideways almost as soon as the visitors arrive. Paddy seems nice, but there are red flags, too, like when he's needlessly cruel to his son. Louise wants to leave, but politeness keeps her family there. Ant tries to signal that something’s wrong, but because he doesn’t have a tongue, the boy can’t verbalize a warning. Instead, he’s able to pull Agnes aside and show her a photo album of families that Paddy’s brought there and then killed, which includes Ant’s own.

Paddy ultimately reveals his intentions, holding them hostage at gunpoint and forcing Ben and Louise to wire him money, but they break away and try to survive while Paddy and Ciara hunt them through the house. Ciara falls off a ladder, breaks her neck and dies, and Paddy is thwarted as well: Ant crushes his head by pounding him repeatedly with a large rock and then leaves with Ben, Louise and Agnes.

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The movie charts much of the same territory as the original “Evil,” except for the finale: In the Danish movie, the visitors escape the country house but are stopped by the villains. The mom and dad are forced out of their car and into a ditch and stoned to death. And Agnes’ tongue is cut out before becoming the “daughter” for the bad guys as they search for another family to victimize.

McAvoy feels the redo is “definitely” a different experience, and the ending for Watkins’ film works best for that bunch of characters and narrative. 

“The views and the attitudes and the actions of Patty are so toxic at times that I think if the film sided with him, if the film let him win, then it almost validates his views,” McAvoy explains. “The film has to judge him. And I'm not sure the original film had the same issue quite as strongly as this one does.”

Plus, he adds, “the original film wasn't something that 90% of cinema-going audiences went to see and they will not go and see. So what is the problem in bringing that story to a new audience?”

McAvoy admits he didn’t watch the first “Evil” before making the new one. (He also only made it through 45 seconds of the trailer.) “I wanted it to be my version of it,” says the Scottish actor, who watched the first movie after filming completed. “I really enjoyed it. But I was so glad that I wasn't aware of any of those things at the same time.”

He also has a perspective on remakes, influenced by years of classical theater.

“When I do ‘Macbeth,’ I don't do a remake of ‘Macbeth.’ I am remaking it for literally the ten-hundredth-thousandth time, but we don't call it a remake,” McAvoy says. “Of course there are people in that audience who have seen it before, but I'm doing it for the first time and I'm making it for people who I assume have never seen it before.

“So we don't remake anything, really. Whenever you make something again, you make it new.”