The last pair of movies in this week’s look at Originals vs. Remakes are both the most recent and have the shortest time between the two. The original Speak No Evil is a Danish horror film that I hadn’t heard of until the remake came out and even then didn’t realize it existed until I started looking into the American version of it. Knowing the basic premise from the trailers of the remake but little else, I was going into this fairly blind on what to expect from it, especially since I also haven’t had too much interaction with Danish horror before.

Danish couple Bjorn and Louise are on vacation in Italy with their daughter Agnes when they run into another family that they hit it off with, the Dutch couple Patrick and Karin and their son Abel. Some months later, they receive a letter from Patrick and Karin inviting them to visit their house in Netherlands. Initially uncertain, they decide to go and head off to see the people they had barely known for 2 days. While welcoming and excited to see them, there is something off about the couple that wasn’t there originally during the vacation. The creeping wrongness of the weekend continues to increase until Bjorn makes a discovery that will make him wish he wasn’t so goddamn polite and accommodating all the damn time.

When we talk about slow burn horror movies, this is a prime example of that. Louise begins to feel uncomfortable and wants to leave almost immediately but, honestly, it takes a while for Patrick and Karin to do anything that would really make me uncomfortable. A lot of that has to do with Fedja van Huêt playing Patrick. He is so goddamn charming and charismatic that you fully believe he doesn’t mean any harm and nothing he does seems malicious. At worst he occasionally seems to be a bit of a jackass that hasn’t realized the other people around him don’t think he’s as funny as he thinks he is. It takes almost an hour into the runtime before the facade finally cracks and you realize that there is actually something very wrong with these people.

The horror in this comes from a two-fold place. There is the obvious family peril that you get in any type of home invasion or standard slasher where what’s scary is somebody means you harm and you can’t get away. That’s the less interesting aspect of this. The other horror of it is the horror of acceptance of this danger because of social norms. Bjorn and Louise find themselves in this predicament because at every point where they could have put an end to it or demanded a change, they simply didn’t because it wouldn’t be polite. It’s the horror of letting the killer murder you because trying to stop them would be “causing a scene” and you don’t want to make a fuss.

I’m now interested to see how the remake plays out because I can’t imagine an American couple giving as much of a fuck about being polite house guests.

Score: 3.5 out of 5