James McAvoy to star in American remake of hit Danish horror film Speak No Evil

Few things are less scary than the one sentence premise of a horror movie/thriller that the studio doesn’t want to spoil. Case in point: Blumhouse and Universal’s American remake of Danish film Speak No Evil (a.k.a. Gaesterne), which a Hollywood Reporter story says “centers on a family that takes a dream holiday to an idyllic country house, only to have the vacation turn into a psychological nightmare.” That could mean anything! And it could describe so many existing movies!

But that’s beside the point, which is that Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil is getting an American remake from Blumhouse and Universal. James Watkins, who previously made The Woman In Black (a movie about a man visiting a house in the country who later experiences a psychological nightmare), will direct. James McAvoy, star of Split (in which a man… sort of takes women on a vacation that ends up being a psychological nightmare), will star in this, though The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t say if he’s part of the family or part of the psychological nightmare.

For those who haven’t seen the original film and don’t care about some light spoilers, the great A.A. Dowd once wrote that Speak No Evil involves a “hellish weekend of intensifying social discomfort” rather than wall-to-wall horror scares, saying it “offers a pointed tweak to the motives of The Strangers and an exaggerated lesson on the consequences of holding your tongue.” (Spoiler alert: Heh heh.) There’s a family with a kid, a slightly weird family with a slightly weird kid, and it plays with the classic horror/thriller trope of the audience asking why the characters don’t just run away the second things start to take a turn.

The American Speak No Evil is set to come out on August 9, 2024.