We need to talk about 'Speak No Evil's twisted ending
It's always nice when the ending of a horror film packs a punch, but every now and then one comes along that actually leaves you winded.
Speak No Evil, Christian Tafdrup's dark thriller about a family who make some unusual new friends abroad, falls comfortably into this category, luring us in with two acts full of social discomfort before turning the screw in the final 30 minutes.
If you've seen the film you're probably still sitting in a state of WTF. But actually, how much foreshadowing was there? Were the signs there all along, or was that ending really as out-of-the-blue as it felt?
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Let's take a look...
What happens in Speak No Evil?
The plot is simple enough. A couple, Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), and their daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg) go on holiday in Europe where they meet another couple, Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders), and their son Abel (Marius Damslev), who is unable to speak due to a congenitally short tongue. After the holiday Patrick and Karin invite Bjørn and Louise to their rural home in the Netherlands, they accept, and it all goes quickly downhill from there.
It starts with small things, like Patrick "forgetting" that Louise is vegetarian, and quickly escalates to Patrick aggressively shouting at Abel, drunk driving the couple home from dinner, and carrying Agnes to sleep alongside him and Karin after she wakes crying in the night.
Bjørn and Louise decide to leave, but Agnes forgets her stuffed rabbit and Bjørn goes back for it. They end up being persuaded to stay another night. And during that night, Bjørn makes a horrific discovery.
What's the twist at the end?
In a building separate to the main house, Bjørn discovers an attic room covered with holiday photographs. Each photo contains an image of Patrick and Karin with a different couple and — crucially — different children.
After finding Abel floating face down in Patrick's swimming pool, it becomes clear what Patrick and Karin are doing: killing couples they meet on holiday and taking their children to use as bait for their next kill. Their modus operandi is to murder the parents, cut out the child's tongue so they can't say what's happened, take them on holiday, and then target another couple with a single child to continue the cycle. Yep, pretty horrendous.
What clues are there?
Like the best twist endings, this one isn't easy to see coming. It catches you off guard. But looking back through the movie, there are some moments that foreshadow what happens.
The main clues lie in the behaviour of Patrick and Karin, and the way they keep slowly taking more and more things from Bjørn and Louise.
The first time Bjørn meets Patrick he asks to take the poolside chair next to him, and even though Bjørn's daughter is clearly using it — her stuff is still lying on it — Bjørn gives in to politeness and lets Patrick have it. This possessiveness increases throughout the movie, and always seems to revolve around the couple's daughter: Patrick and Karin decide where she's going to sleep, setting her up with a tiny bed in Abel's room; they decide when she's going to stay home, organising a babysitter to come and look after her without telling her parents until the last minute; there's the aforementioned night crying episode; Karin tells her what to do, bossing her around so much during one meal that Louise eventually intervenes.
In hindsight, what they're doing is obvious: Slowly acting more and more like Agnes' parents. They're getting used to the roles they plan to adopt after they've murdered Bjørn and Louise.
A movie filled with screams
Without his tongue, and presumably too young to write, Abel is never able to tell Bjørn and Louise what's happened to him. He can't tell them that the people posing as his parents are imposters, or that they murdered his real parents. The closest thing he can do is open his mouth in a silent cry and show Bjørn the stump of his tongue. At the time Bjørn views it as strange behaviour, just like Abel's constant moans in the night — but it's all really a cry for help.
Speaking of cries for help, another final clue comes when Patrick leads Bjørn into the quarry where he'll eventually kill him. Patrick instructs him to scream as loud as he can, telling him it's a place nobody will be able to hear him.
And ultimately, like everything else in this film, it all comes around in a horrible full circle.
Speak No Evil is streaming on Shudder.
