This contains potentially distressing discussions of murder, including violence against children.

Like numerous other acclaimed art horror movies, the controversial Shudder release Speak No Evil posits pacifism and politeness as lethal flaws. Upon its 2014 release, the recently-remade Austrian psychological horror Goodnight Mommy earned a lot of comparisons to Michael Haneke’s acclaimed horror, Funny Games. Despite the aesthetic similarities between the two movies (a limited cast and settings, a cold, austere collar palette, a slow-burn atmosphere of dread, and drawn-out scenes of torture), the comparison was a superficial one.

Funny Games, as a meta horror movie that deconstructed the audience’s relationship with the movie, didn’t have much in common with the more straightforward Goodnight Mommy. However, Funny Games does have a lot in common with Shudder’s recent release, Speak No Evil. In fact, Speak No Evil could be compared to a string of successful European art horror movies, and that is not necessarily a good thing.

Related: Biggest Horror Movies Coming In Fall/Winter 2022Like (the also acclaimed) Funny Games, Borgman, and (to a lesser extent) Nothing Bad Can Happen, Speak No Evil’s familiar story depicts pacifism and politeness as lethal flaws. In Speak No Evil, an upper-class family is brutally murdered for the crime of being too polite, a weirdly specific European horror trend with unpleasant implications. While not every horror movie comes complete with an obvious social message like Radio Silence's brilliant class satire Ready Or Not or Get Out’s ingenious commentary on racism, Speak No Evil and the rest of these European modern horror movies do have something similar to say about well-off families trusting others and trying to be friendly, and it’s nothing good.

How The Speak No Evil Ending Uses A Recent Horror Trend

The family in the car in Speak No Evil.

The Speak No Evil ending sees a couple stoned to death and their child kidnapped and disfigured when the pair repeatedly refused to call out the increasingly discomfiting, weird, and inappropriate behavior of their new friends. In short, Speak No Evil’s story follows the Danish family Bjorn, Louise, and their daughter Agnes as they visit the Dutch family Patrick, Karin, and their silent son Abel. The host family is rude from the outset, insisting that Louise eat meat even though she is a pescatarian and making Patrick pay for dinner, as well as leaving Agnes and Abel in the care of a babysitter, Muhajid, without warning the couple. The Shudder horror movie kicks the discomfort up a notch when Patrick verbally abuses Abel in front of Louise and Bjorn and watches Louise shower. Eventually, Bjorn hears Patrick beating Abel and finds the child’s dead body in a shed, alongside evidence that Patrick and Karin have killed couples before kidnapping and maiming their children. The steadily escalation of unsettling and violent behaviors up until the Speak No Evil ending is suggested to be in part the fault of the Danish family's desire to be polite and well-mannered guests, continuing an implication found in a number of recent European horror, which suggests that a hospitable nature is a bad trait.

Why Art Horror Is Obsessed With Manners

Peter and Paul sitting with the family in their house in Funny Games

Bjorn fails to save his family from Patrick thanks to a pair of plot contrivances. First, his car breaks down at the worst possible moment as he attempts to drive away from Karin and Bjorn’s house with Agnes and Louise in tow. Second, in a less egregious horror movie cliche, Bjorn and Louise do nothing when, after Patrick takes them hostage, he leaves the keys in the ignition during a bathroom break and gives them an opportunity to escape. Why do the pair simply sit awaiting his return and their inevitable death? The answer is because they are apparently paralyzed by politeness, as Speak No Evil's plot equates the couple’s choice to not loudly disavow their host’s peculiarities with an inability to protect themselves in any way. Haneke’s Funny Games offers a meta twist on the same core idea, where the villains can rewind the movie when the heroine gets one over on them and the viewer is repeatedly harangued for continuing to watch such a bleak, hopeless story.

In both modern horror movies, inaction is taken as a sign of weakness and moral failing. Bjorn’s family dies because he isn’t tough enough to stand up to Patrick in the M Night Shyamalan-worthy twist ending of Speak No Evil, where the Dutch family’s cultural differences turn out to be a sham covering up a nefarious, far-fetched criminal enterprise. Similarly, the heroes of Funny Games die not because the screenwriter wrote a sad ending, but because the viewer failed to switch it off. Even the hero of Nothing Bad Can Happen is gradually destroyed psychically and mentally because he opts to be a pacifist and, for some utterly unknowable reason, continues to hang out with a monstrous man who tortures him. In each case, these European horror movies invent absurd hypothetical premises wherein being polite, accepting someone’s odd behavior, and even continuing to watch a horror movie are all viewed as personal failings.

Related: They/Them Must Avoid A Major Socially Conscious Horror Mistake

How Speak No Evil’s Horror Trope Makes A Confusing Moral

Speak No Evil Patrick and Bjorn scream at each other

A lot of great horror movies, like the classic Bret Easton Ellis adaptation American Psycho, make pertinent points about social class and how it affects a person's view of the world. However, Funny Games and Speak No Evil take this in an unexpected direction with their stories of victimized upper-class families. Speak No Evil implies that the rich Danish family could have survived if only their patriarch wasn’t so spineless, polite, willing to accept cultural differences, and accepting of others. The moral of Speak No Evil (and it is a didactic moral, one that is relentlessly and repeatedly hammered home) is that upper-class men must stop respecting cultural differences and start fighting back—a weird, uncomfortable message for an acclaimed art horror movie in 2022. Where a lot of great recent horror movies like 2019’s Ready Or Not depict the poor standing up to the rich, in Speak No Evil, the viewer is left wishing that the well-off Bjorn would take down the evil, unemployed Patrick.

Why Speak No Evil Isn’t As Shocking As It Thinks

Agnes and Louise in Speak No Evil

The idea that men need to be tougher, less polite, and quicker to fight is hardly a revolutionary or daring one, even when delivered via an arty European psychological horror movie. As if to make Speak No Evil's point clearer, in the same scene that reveals Patrick is a lying sociopath, the character mentions that he doesn’t believe in work (which is part of Speak No Evil’s evidence that he is a uniquely evil, monstrous person). While Speak No Evil aims to elicit the same audience shock as similar dark horror movie installments like Funny Games, the characterization of the villains as almost cartoonish child kidnapping (and murdering) sociopaths reduces their ability to provide shock value after the big reveal, much in the way exploring the backstories of horror movie monsters tends to lessen their ability to frighten - which when combined with the movie's message, loses much of the grim pull that similar premises like Funny Games and The Strangers became more popular for.