Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel never sounded quite the same after Quentin Tarantino used it to accompany Michael Madsen’s ear-slicing torture of a tied-up policeman in Reservoir Dogs. Anybody who saw the David Fincher version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, meanwhile, may feel Enya’s Orinoco Flow was equally tainted when Stellan Skarsgård’s Martin Vanger used it to soundtrack his shackling and suffocating of Daniel Craig’s Mikael Blomkvist.
Thanks to James Watkins’ latest, we can now add another track to the list of innocuous earworms mischievously used to score moments of menace and violence: The Bangles’ 1989 chart-topper Eternal Flame. To reveal exactly how Susanna Hoffs’ dulcet tones feature in the Eden Lake director’s nail-biting remake of 2022 Danish thriller Gæsterne would be a spoiler too far. Suffice to say that, if Speak No Evil does its job properly, it won’t be ‘sun shines through the rain’ you’ll think of the next time you hear it.
