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

THE OPINION OF “THE WORLD” – TO SEE

We discovered British director James Watkins in 2008 with a particularly disturbing thriller, Eden Lake. For those who still have this first feature film in mind, the choice to make a remake, produced by the American company Blumhouse, of the Danish film Don’t say anythingreleased in 2022, will not seem surprising. The situation on which the original film, directed by Christian Tafdrup, is built could only inspire a filmmaker who had already succeeded in constructing a story nourished 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 mute child due to a malformation. The families get along, although they have different temperaments, and the Fields invite their new friends to spend a few days at their home in the English countryside. They accept, but what should have been a relaxing time will gradually turn into a nightmare.

Trivial details

The real interest in James Watkins’ film lies in the way the characters are skillfully sketched, in the way their psychology is discreetly linked to class habits, in the way their social identity determines a series of behaviors. The Daltons are middle-class, declassed people, the Fields seem to be class defectors, freer in morals, less uptight, less restrained by the conventions of society. The hypocritical restraint of the former forms a contrast with the disinhibition of the latter, and especially of the head of the family, embodied, with a certain threatening exuberance, by James McAvoy.

It is with the succession of a series of insignificant and trivial details that a sort of unease gradually sets in, until the final revelation. The last part of the film certainly sacrifices to the somewhat hackneyed conventions of the horror film. But, during an hour and fifty minutes, we will have had the leisure to note that the anxiety felt by the spectator was essentially provoked by the familiar and banal character of rather unpleasant beings, because too ordinary, and of rather trivial events. Fear is here nestled in the recognition of a life without relief and without quality, and the observation of a disarming reality of mediocrity.