With “Speak No Evil,” director James Watkins brings a wind of fear to the English countryside

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE

We discovered British director James Watkins in 2008 with a particularly disturbing thriller, Eden lakeFor those who still have this first feature film in mind, the choice to make a new version, produced by the American company Blumhouse, of the Danish film don’t say anythingReleased in 2022, it will not seem surprising. The situation on which Christian Tafdrup’s original film is built could only inspire a filmmaker who had already managed to build a story fueled by a form of sociological and anthropological description of its protagonists.

Ben and Louise Dalton, an American couple living in London on holiday in Italy with their daughter, meet the Fields, an English doctor, his wife and their son, who is mute due to a birth defect. The families get along well, although they have different temperaments, and the Fields offer their new friends the chance to spend a few days with them in the English countryside. They accept, but what should have been moments of relaxation will gradually turn into a nightmare.

Trivial details

The real interest of James Watkins’ film lies in the way the characters are skilfully sketched, in how their psychology is discreetly linked to class habits, in how their social identity determines a series of behaviours. The Daltons are declassed middle class bourgeois, the Fields seem to be class deserters, more free in their morals, less tense, less restricted by the conventions of society. The hypocritical moderation of one contrasts with the disinhibition of the others, and in particular of the head of the family, played, with a certain menacing exuberance, by James McAvoy.

It is with the succession of a series of insignificant and trivial details that a kind of uneasiness gradually sets in, until the final revelation. The last part of the film certainly sacrifices the somewhat hackneyed conventions of horror films. But, over the course of an hour and a half, we will have had the opportunity to verify that the anxiety felt by the spectator was essentially caused by the familiar and banal character of beings who were quite unpleasant, for being too ordinary, and of events that were quite innocuous. Fear here nests in the recognition of a life without relief and without quality, and in the observation of a disarming reality of mediocrity.