Speak No Evil's James McAvoy and director James Watkins break down that wild ending

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Speak No Evil.

While James Watkins’ Speak No Evil follows the same basic premise as Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 Danish original, the characters in each film react very differently to their shared predicaments. Ultimately, the way they face those challenges becomes the difference between a chance at escape and a grisly end.

In both films, two couples, each with a young child, meet and become friendly on vacation. Later, after they’ve returned to their normal lives, one invites the other to visit their remote country home. At first, their different personalities lead to awkward but seemingly harmless social situations. The visiting family, played by Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis in the 2024 version, are uptight city slickers and helicopter parents struggling to save their rocky marriage. Their more down-to-earth hosts, played this time by James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi, are their opposites: free-spirited, relaxed, and open with their affections. But as the more gregarious couple become increasingly bizarre and aggressive, their guests struggle to stand up for themselves — and slowly begin to suspect something nefarious about their new friends. 

“It explores how we can all be constrained and trapped by the social rules and by our own politeness and how we can sometimes find it difficult to negotiate or call out bad behavior,” Watkins tells Entertainment Weekly. “It's that notion that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and by people self-censoring, I suppose.”

Besides the change of cast and setting (from Denmark to the U.K.), the biggest and most obvious difference between the films is their endings. In the original, the visiting couple is compliant right up to their grisly end, literally digging their own graves in what has become an infamous final scene. But McNairy and Davis’ American expats don’t go quite so quietly into the night when McAvoy finally reveals his true nature.   

“Partly because I had American characters, I didn't want them to be completely compliant,” Watkins explains. “I didn't believe they would be. I've talked about this with Scoot, and he was like, ’No f---ing way, man. I'm from Texas.’ It's like when you reach that point when you and your child are in mortal danger, however ineptly you do it — and they are inept deliberately — you at least try, whether it's to run, to hide, to fight. I think that's a difference in my movie. And I deliberately wanted to explore how people behave when confronted with that violence. Because now we're in a world — again, it's an extension of the theme, I suppose — where we're in a civilized society and there isn't that violence. So then when you are confronted with it, how do you behave?”

McNairy recalls that conversation about his Texas roots, but he’s quick to note that geography doesn’t necessarily dictate how people respond to violence. “All people react to trauma completely differently,” he says. “And I think that the reaction in the original, some people do freeze and are frozen and can't [fight back], so I can't ignore that personality trait. That being said, for me personally, it felt like you would do whatever you got to do, even if it takes your life, to help your kids. So I don't know if that's a cultural difference or just a personal difference.”

Whatever the cause, and however feeble, watching Ben and Louise take a stand was a satisfying update for McNairy, who's a fan of the 2022 version. “I loved the original film. I mean, I really love it,” he says. “[But] one of the things that didn't sit with me from watching the Dutch version was I really wanted those parents to do something in the end, at least try to fight. And so what James Watkins did with the end in the third act that makes this film almost completely different than the original facilitated some of those things that I was like, ‘Oh, I wish they would've done this.’ We were able to go back and explore that.”  

“I'm a sick freak, so I liked the original [ending],” adds Davis with a laugh. “However, I think after being tortured for the whole movie in the audience and cringing that much, I want there to be a conclusion. I want to feel like I can breathe at the end, and the sort of ‘edgier’ ending doesn't quite give you that feeling, and there's a lot of value in that. I like how ours gives a little catharsis.”

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“Ours is better,” McAvoy jokes when asked which version he prefers. “Joking! No, actually, I really enjoyed my experience watching the two movies. And I thought what James [Watkins] said was really interesting: With the framework that this story provides, you can put people in different parts of the world in these social situations and the way they react to them could be very different.”

While McNairy and Davis might put up more of a fight than their Danish counterparts, don’t expect them to turn into superheroes in the third act. “I love that the film doesn’t have a Hollywood heroic ending with an unreluctant hero,” says McNairy. “It felt more like it stayed in this world of grounded reality of what this character has learned over his journey in this film, which is that there's strength in weakness. There's strength in being a good father. There's strength in being a good husband. There's strength in fighting for your family. And through that strength, he can find resistance.”

Speak No Evil is now in theaters.