In Review: 'Speak No Evil,' 'My Old Ass'

A daring Danish thriller gets an American remake and an indie comedy with a different sort of doubling proves sneakily profound.

Speak No Evil
Dir. James Watkins
110 min.

Almost exactly two years ago, to the day, I reviewed the Danish shocker Speak No Evil, which had rightly drawn attention as a thriller that teases the audience with minor transgressions and assaults on the norms before turning into an unvarnished nightmare in the final third. There was something uncomfortably familiar about the interplay between a bourgeois family going rustic on a weekend visit to a farm in the Netherlands, as they soon realize their hosts are not, shall we say, temperamentally sympatico. How does a guest, for example, turn down a bite of roasted boar without insulting her hosts, even though she was certain they knew she was a vegetarian? And how many other unpleasant moments or incidents will it take for the guests to leave altogether. Sometimes, it’s easier just to choke down a few awkward bites, survive the weekend, and never see these terrible people again. 

The first two-thirds of the new American remake of Speak No Evil recreates this discomfiting dynamic to uncanny effect, with solid casting and a filmmaking sheen that takes nothing away from the grimy, to-the-bone tension that makes this story hum. But let’s state the obvious: The 2022 Danish version did it already, so what’s the point? In fact, the most common language spoken between the Danes and the Dutch is English, so Speak No Evil is an English-language remake of an English-language movie that was just released two years ago to reasonably significant fanfare. For anyone new to the material, it probably works more or less the same malevolent, passive-aggressive magic. For others, it’s déjà vu all over again, at least until it finally gets around to insulting its audience like the American remake of The Vanishing in the disgraceful final third. 

On a vacation to a Tuscan town out of a picture book, Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben (Scoot McNairy), an American couple currently living in London with their sensitive daughter (Alix West Lefler), take a liking to a family from rural Britain who seem brash and gregarious. The husband, Paddy (James McAvoy), can get a little boorish, but his wife Clara (Aisling Franciosi) seems sweet and their son (Dan Hough) does, too, despite a short tongue that limits his speech. Though they’re initially reluctant to accept Paddy’s offer to visit the farm for a weekend of fresh air and hiking excursions, Louise and Ben decide they could use a break and drive out to his isolated estate. The trip turns regrettable almost immediately, but it takes time to realize that Paddy and Clara are something more insidious than mere country louts. 

Once real danger starts to loom for Louise and Ben, Speak No Evil morphs into a B-grade Straw Dogs scenario in which Paddy’s alpha-male aggressions are a test for Ben’s manhood that he isn’t well-equipped to pass. The writer-director, James Watkins (The Woman in Black), turns McNairy’s Ben into such an accommodating weakling that the film, like Straw Dogs, seems to regard him with the same hostility Paddy does, all in the effort to engineer a gruesome climactic free-for-all. Then Watkins doesn’t have the moxie to follow through on the original ending, falling back instead on a more conventional Hollywood finale that sells the material out. So much for toughness. — Scott Tobias

Speak No Evil (2024) opens in theaters everywhere tonight. Speak No Evil (2022) is streaming on Shudder and AMC+, can be rented anywhere, and is much better.

My Old Ass
Dir. Megan Park
89 min.

Elliott (Maisy Stella) knows exactly how she wants to celebrate her 18th birthday. After spending another aimless day in the final weeks before leaving her family’s cranberry farm for college in Toronto, she plans to spend the night on an island in a nearby lake tripping on mushrooms for the first time and not worrying about a thing. The plan only half works out. When the drugs kick in and her friends bliss out, Elliott gets a visitor in the form of her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza). They talk and it quickly becomes clear Elliott’s wry sense of humor has stayed with her as they consider how weird all this is. (Should they kiss? How awkward would that be?) Elliott’s coy about what lies ahead for her her in the 21 years that divide them (apart from the advice she should enjoy salmon while it’s still around) except on one point: stay away from a guy named Chad. It doesn’t take long for a guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White) to show up.

That’s the high-concept hook of this winningly low-key, sneakily moving comedy, the second feature written and directed by Megan Park (The Fallout). After meeting Chad, who’s spending the summer working on the family farm, Elliott discovers she can text and call her older self, who remains as cryptic with details and steadfast in her warning. That intensifies Elliott’s confusion when she starts to develop feelings for Chad, who seems both deeply sweet and thoroughly non-threatening. She had, up to that moment, thought she was exclusively attracted to girls (and, in fact, had just started hooking up with her “dream girl”). So what’s going on?

My Old Ass seems at first as shapeless and leisurely as the summer in which it’s set and Park seems content to pace it to the rhythms of Stella’s charming performance. She plays Elliott as a sarcastic, endearing know-it-all brimming with misplaced confidence that she knows exactly where life is going to take her. That makes her all the more easily rattled when other possibilities present themselves. The sensitively handled film is decidedly not about a queer person going straight and the perplexity inspired by her attraction to Chad becomes just part of a swirl of confusion that envelops Elliott after she encounters the woman she’ll become. Between jokes about the future and her warnings about Chad, the older Elliott slips in advice to appreciate the present and, in time, My Old Ass reveals itself as a film about that liminal space between childhood and adulthood, where we start to realize that everything that once seemed permanent will someday slip away. What at first seems like a loose diversion built around playful banter and the occasional hallucinogen-inspired musical number eventually reveals unexpected depths. Like time, this one sneaks up on you. —Keith Phipps

My Old Ass opens in limited release tonight.