"Stark and unsettling." "Depraved." "I never, ever want to see it again." So read the reviews of Christian Tafdrup’s Danish-Dutch production Speak No Evil (2022), a film so unflinching and unsparing it was immediately elevated (or should that be relegated?) to 'bleakest movies ever made' conversations alongside the likes of Salò, Requiem for a Dream, and Cannibal Holocaust.
No English-language remake would ever have the cojones to match it, right? Tellingly, when it was announced that Blumhouse Productions would be cranking out a redo starring James McAvoy and Mackenzie Davis, the go-to comparison was the remake of George Sluizer’s suffocating Dutch horror The Vanishing (1988). That film, labelled by Stanley Kubrick as the scariest he’d seen, ended on a crushing note of nihilism, only for the 1993 remake to flip the talking-point, WTF, no-dear-God climax – some feat given Sluizer himself was back in the director’s chair.
