When the ending of a horror film packs a punch, it's always nice, but it's not always the case.
Christian Tafdrup's Speak No Evil is a dark thriller about a family who make some unusual new friends abroad and then turn the screw in the last 30 minutes.
If you haven't seen the film yet, you're probably sitting in a state of confusion. How much of a tease was there? Was the ending as out-of-the-blue as it seemed?
Let's see what we can find...
The plot is easy to understand. A group of people, including a couple and their daughter, go on a holiday in Europe where they meet two other people. After the holiday Patrick and Karin invite Bjrn and Louise to their rural home in the Netherlands, and things go downhill from there.
It starts with small things, like Patrick "forgetting" that Louise is vegetarian, and quickly escalates to Patrick shouting at Abel, drunk driving the couple home from dinner, and carrying Agnes to sleep with him.
The two people decided to leave, but the other person forgot her stuffed animal. They are told to stay another night. A terrible discovery is made by Bjrn during that night.
There is an attic room with holiday photographs in a building separate from the main house. A different couple and different children are depicted in the photos.
After finding a corpse in Patrick's swimming pool, it became clear that Patrick and Karin were going to kill couples they meet on holiday and take their children to use as bait. Their method is to murder the parents, cut out the child's tongue, and then target another couple with a single child to continue the cycle. It's pretty horrible.
This one is hard to see coming. You don't know what to think. There are some moments that show what will happen.
The way Patrick and Karin take more and more things from Bjrn and Louise is a clue.
The first time Patrick met Bjrn, he asked to take the chair next to him, but even though his daughter was using it, he let him have it. This possessiveness increases throughout the movie, and always seems to be centered around the couple's daughter, as they decide where she's going to sleep and when she's going to stay home.
They are slowly acting like their parents. They're getting used to the roles they'll be playing after they kill people.
There is a lot of screaming in "Speak No Evil", especially at the end. Credit: Shudder
Without his tongue, he can't tell Louise what happened to him. He can't tell them that the people pretending to be his parents are actually murderers. He can't do anything about the stump of his tongue. It's all a cry for help, just like Abel's constant moans in the night, but at the time Bjrn thought it was weird.
When Patrick leads Bjrn into the quarry, he will kill him. Patrick told him that nobody will be able to hear him when he screams.
It all comes around in a horrible full circle.
Speak No Evil is available to watch on Shudder.
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