Two European families—one Danish, one Dutch—meet during a picturesque Italian vacation in Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil. Their bond is immediate, and soon enough the Dutch couple enthusiastically invite the Danes to visit them in Holland. The gesture is friendly enough, but the sincerity of the statement isn’t necessarily taken at face value.  Shortly after the Danes—Bjørn (Morten Burian), Louisa (Sidsel Siem Koch) and their daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg)—return to their well-kept abode, they receive a postcard in the mail. As it turns out, the Dutch family was completely serious about their offer, inviting them to visit their home in […]

Watch the trailer for Danish director Christian Tafdrup’s unnerving horror-satire Speak No Evil. The film follows two families who hail from different European countries (Denmark and Holland) and decide to keep in touch after meeting on an Italian vacation. A few months later, the Dutch family invites the Danes to visit their retro Holland abode for the holidays. As one can imagine, things soon begin to go horribly awry. In his dispatch out of Sundance, Filmmaker‘s Vadim Rizov wrote that “Speak No Evil gets the job done, buoyed in part by the novel cultural politics of its Western European faceoff.” […]

Shudder announced the acquisition of Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil just before the film’s Sundance premiere. It’s probably one of this year’s breakout titles—at any rate, enough people in my Twitter feed recommended it to redirect me from previously planned viewing and Tafdrup’s freshly signed to WME. In his “Meet the Artist” video, the co-writer (with his brother, Mads) and director displays an entertaining flair for hammy hucksterism in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents intro vein. Sitting in front of a fire, he smilingly reads out comments from a test screening (“The director has to be mentally examined”; “A horrible, horrible film”; “This film […]