Speak No Evil (2024) Production Notes

When an American family is invited to spend the weekend at the idyllic farmhouse of a charming British family they befriended on vacation, what begins as a dream holiday soon warps into a snarled psychological nightmare.

Please note: Some production notes may contain spoilers.

THE SYNOPSIS

When an American family is invited to spend the weekend at the idyllic farmhouse of a charming British family they befriended on vacation, what begins as a dream holiday soon warps into a snarled psychological nightmare.

From Blumhouse, the producer of The Black Phone, Get Out and The Invisible Man, comes an intense suspense thriller for our modern age, starring BAFTA award-winner JAMES McAVOY (Split, Glass) in a riveting performance as the charismatic, alpha-male host whose untrammeled hospitality masks an unspeakable darkness.

Speak No Evil stars MACKENZIE DAVIS (Terminator: Dark Fate, Halt and Catch Fire) and SAG award-winner SCOOT MCNAIRY (Argo, A Quiet Place Part II) as American couple Louise and Ben Dalton, who, along with their 11-year-old daughter Agnes (ALIX WEST LEFLER; The Good Nurse, Riverdale), accept the weekend-holiday invitation of Paddy (McAVOY), his wife Ciara (AISLING FRANCIOSI; Game of Thrones, The Fall) and their furtive, mute son Ant (newcomer DAN HOUGH). The cast also features KRIS HITCHEN (Sorry We Missed You), MOTAZ MALHEES (The Journey of Others) and JAKOB HØJLEV JØRGENSEN ((2012’s The Hunt).

Written for the screen and directed by JAMES WATKINS, the writer-director of Eden Lake and the award-winning gothic ghost story The Woman in Black, Speak No Evil is based upon the screenplay of the 2022 Danish horror sensation Gæsterne, written by CHRISTIAN TAFDRUP and MADS TAFDRUP.

Speak No Evil is produced by JASON BLUM (Five Nights at Freddy’s, M3GAN) for Blumhouse and by PAUL RITCHIE (McMafia, Slumdog Millionaire). The film is executive produced by BEATRIZ SEQUEIRA for Blumhouse, and by JACOB JAREK and CHRISTIAN TAFDRUP. The co-producers are JON ROMANO and JENNIFER SCUDDER TRENT.

The film’s director of photography is TIM MAURICE-JONES bsc (The Woman in Black, Black Mirror) and the production designer is Academy Award® winner JAMES PRICE (Poor Things, The Iron Claw). The editor is Oscar® nominee JON HARRIS (127 Hours, Kingsman: The Secret Service) and the music is by the Emmy nominated team of DANNY BENSI (Fear the Walking Dead, Ozark) and SAUNDER JURRIAANS (Fear the Walking Dead, Ozark). The music supervisor is LUCY BRIGHT (Tár, The Iron Claw). The casting is by TERRI TAYLOR csa (Five Nights at Freddy’s, M3GAN), ALLY CONOVER csa (M3GAN, The Black Phone) and HEATHER BASTEN cdg (Dreaming Whilst Black, Queen Cleopatra).

The costume designer is KEITH MADDEN (The Woman in Black, Patrick Melrose) and the hair and make-up designer is NICOLE STAFFORD (The Death of Stalin, 45 Years). The stunt coordinator is JIMMY O’ DEE (A Haunting in Venice, Belfast) and the SFX supervisor is STEVE PATON (Wrath of Man, Liaison).

THE BACKSTORY

For almost two decades now, Blumhouse has thrilled audiences—and scared the hell out of them—with fresh takes on paranormal activity and every form of evil under the sun (and several full moons, too). But it has also expanded the boundaries of the horror genre with films that have turned the tensions and rituals of everyday life into provocative, topical, wickedly impish entertainment, from Get Out, Jordan Peele’s ingeniously freaky fable about racism in America, to the riotous social satire of The Purge franchise. Now, from writer-director James Watkins comes a twisted take on a British comedy of manners, in which one family’s trip into the countryside to visit some new friends goes horrifically awry, escalating from an awkward social ordeal that challenges their notions of politeness into a shocking nightmare in which they must abandon all civility and fight for their survival.

Speak No Evil is based upon the screenplay of the 2022 Danish thriller, Gaesterne (“The Guests” in Danish). “A couple of years back, I got a call from an executive at Universal who had just seen a film at Sundance that got completely under his skin,” producer Jason Blum says. “I’m always glad to be the guy who gets the call when someone sees something disturbing— if it ruins your day, call me!— so I arranged to see it and I was floored. As it unfolded, I recoiled with each new revelation, and when it was over, I couldn’t shake it. I believed that in the right hands, an English language reinterpretation could be a very memorable, very unsettling, very special film.”

It needed just the right filmmaker, though. Blum had been a huge fan of Watkins’ films Eden Lake and The Woman in Black and thought Watkins might be the ideal fit. He was right. When Watkins saw the Danish film, he immediately connected with the material and saw rich potential in an adaptation. “I loved the sly and relatable conceit: people on holiday questioning the direction of their lives and befriending a couple who they think might hold the answers,” Watkins says. “The film really hooked me on a thematic level: its exploration of how modern society shackles us with rules and how we struggle to negotiate them.”

It was exactly the kind of movie that stirs Watkins’s intellect and imagination. “I started my career with a horror-thriller called Eden Lake,” Watkins says. “You’d maybe call it a ‘social horror,’ exploring intergenerational conflict, class fears and cycles of violence in society. I wanted to get back to that intersection of genre and ideas, and this story afforded a chance to have that sort of intelligent fun.”

Watkins’ screenplay resonated with the film’s producers, on more than just a cinematic level. “James has a great sense of story and narrative,” says producer Paul Ritchie, who first worked with Watkins almost 20 years ago on Eden Lake. “He knows the characters inside and out and his impeccable sense of timing and his awareness of the audience experience make him perfectly suited for a film of this ilk.”

Watkins’ screenplay tapped into the universal, every-day relatability of the story’s premise. “James was the perfect choice to write and direct Speak No Evil because he excels at grounded horror, the horror that can happen to anyone,” says executive producer Beatriz Sequeira, who oversaw the production of Speak No Evil on behalf of Blumhouse. “We were all big fans of Eden Lake and so impressed with his ability to create relationships between characters and make even the most innocent of domestic scenes feel like the tensest situation you've ever been in your life. The first time I read James’s script, I remembered these friends that I met while I was on vacation in Fiji who were from New Zealand, where they lived on a cattle farm. I used to think it would be fun to visit them there and get to know them better. But the first thought I had after I had read the script was: ‘That’s not happening anymore.’ That’s how much it scared me.”

Watkins’s screenplay centers on Ben and Louise Dalton, Americans living in England, each grappling with identity crises, both growing distant from each other. Materially comfortable yet miserable, they persist in their struggling marriage to raise their daughter, Agnes, an anxious pre-teen who goes nowhere without the unofficial fourth member of the family, Hoppy, her stuffed animal “comfort bunny.”

The Daltons languishing life takes a turn when they meet Paddy, an earthy, charismatic force of nature, his devoted wife, Ciara, and their son, Ant, while on holiday in Tuscany. Ben and Louise are charmed by Paddy’s gregarious personality and Ciara’s warmth. As camaraderie blooms between the families, the Daltons (and especially Ben) start to see their free-spirited new friends as possible role models to fix their marriage. So it goes that, weeks later, when Paddy and Ciara invite the Daltons to along weekend on their farm in rural England, Ben talks Louise into accepting. In Ben’s mind, “this could be good for us,” he tells her. It could be a literal breath of fresh air, with rugged country living – hunting, hiking, working the land – offering them a chance to reboot and reset. And it offers Ben a chance to be a different kind of person and indulge a certain kind of hyper-masculine, super-libertarian fantasy. But once they get to Paddy and Ciara’s remote, secluded farmstead, far away from anyone and everything they know, Ben, Louise and Agnes discover that who Paddy and Ciara and Ant are on holiday isn’t exactly who they are at home, and that Paddy’s interest in Ben, Louise and Agnes has never been friendly.

“The Daltons, particularly Ben, have been ground down by life, or at least, their lives don’t match up to the packaged perfect lives they are daily told they should be living by the feeds on their devices,” Watkins says. “‘Affluenza’ used to be the term – people who have lots of material things but are still struggling emotionally. Ben is particularly troubled. He feels that he’s past his prime, on the scrapheap. He’s not sure how to negotiate the modern world and its new codes. Paddy opens a door for Ben that makes him wonder: isthere a better way of living? But when they visit the farm so Ben can live out these fantasies of rural authenticity, things aren’t quite what they imagined. The film becomes a kind of ‘check your privilege’ morality tale: Be careful what you wish for when you are complacent about your security and comforts, when you’re feeling trapped by ‘social norms’ and when you want to loosen up and find your animal self. You may think you want danger. But when real danger comes, do you even know how to deal with it?”

Ben captures many of the film’s conflicts regarding identity, but the captivating center of the story is the character who initially presents as the solution to them. In the character of Paddy, Watkins saw an opportunity to comment on the rise of toxic masculinity and personality-cult demagogues. “I wanted to explore a modern crisis in identity, that sense of disenfranchisement that leaves people—mainly men—open to bad mentors like Paddy, who reject all the rules, who promise to ‘take back control,’ who reject the packaged and the polite in favor of some notion of ‘authenticity’,” Watkins says. “I wanted the audience to slightly fall under Paddy’s spell in the way that Ben and Louise do and show how easy it is for a ‘normal’ man like Ben—who has fragilities but is by no means an extremist or an oddball—to buy into this dream and thus become complicit in the shitstorm that it creates. As Paddy says, when Ben and Louise ask him why he’s doing what he’s doing to them: Because you let us.”

While Speak No Evil builds on many of the themes of Gaesterne, it deviates from its inspiration in significant ways, starting with the cultural identities of its main characters. Instead of being Danish, the protagonists are Americans, and instead of being Dutch, the villains are English. “I didn’t want to do a rote American horror take,” Watkins says. “You know the type: fish-out-of-water New Yorkers visit their ‘unvarnished’ new friends in West Virginia .... I felt that there was a very British angle to the characterization and humor where I could bring more specificity and honesty, to mine things closer to home and give the satire more bite.”

Creating a collision between this American couple from the big city with modern values and a British couple from the country with more traditional values allowed Watkins to heighten the tension and make the Daltons (and by extension, the audience) question their perceptions of Paddy and Ciara’s behavior. “The culture clash adds to the confusion at play in the film’s interest in manners, competing or changing norms, and how we read social signals,” Watkins says. “For Ben and Louise, are Paddy and Ciara weird or are they just quirky English eccentrics?! Is their house shabby chic or just shabby? There’s a further irony in that the movie inverts the stereotypes of Brits and Americans. Often, Brits are presented as repressed and Americans as more direct and plain-speaking. That’s always been a simplistic cliché; there’s always been a particular type of Brit like Paddy who is outspoken—and a particular type of American who is quite repressed—and a strain of British humor that revels in saying the unsayable, things Americans would never say. Regardless, I felt all these cross-national confusions would be a rich ingredient in the stew of social anxiety I wanted to cook.”

The other critical change that Watkins made was a new third act that resolves the conflict between Paddy and the Dalton family in a profoundly different way. “I loved the nihilist slap in the face in the third act of Christian’s movie, but I saw an opportunity to further explore the choices and agency of the main characters,” Watkins says. “When the veneer of politeness breaks, what do they do? Can the rules of society be shown as a strength as well as a weakness: could we turn from politeness-as-a-trap to politeness-as-a-means of escape? And when conflict explodes into the open, what then? In real life, very few of us are equipped with how to deal with conflict, with overt aggression. So how do normal people confront this abnormal situation? At what point do our primal needs overcome society’s shackles? At what point do Ben and Louise overcome their reticence and fight back or flee? Can Ben and Louise ultimately reject Paddy’s world view?”

Exploring these questions helped give the Daltons some options for action without subverting the film’s naturalistic grit and sociopolitical bite. “I wanted to give my characters more agency, but I didn’t want them suddenly to become action heroes,” Watkins says. “I hate it when ‘normal people’ suddenly start acting like Navy Seal ninjas in the third act. I want to keep things messy and chaotic and full of fear. I very deliberately wanted to challenge lazy gender stereotypes: for Louise to be more proactive in the final act, even more ‘alpha’ than Ben. And I wanted the notions of character that had been set up to track through and be stress-tested. I wanted Ben to have to confront the false binary of masculinity—raw caveman strength versus modern “liberal” weakness—that Paddy thrusts upon him, and I wanted to lean even further into the themes of toxic masculinity and how violence breeds violence through generations.’”

As Watkins fine-tuned his vision and entered production, he found further inspiration in the films of lauded filmmakers Michael Haneke and Ruben Östlund, and from Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, John Boorman’s Deliverance and Mike White’s Emmy-winning series The White Lotus. “In my head, Speak No Evil was always a psychological thriller with a horrific core,” Watkins says. “This subtle distinction is important in terms of my approach. The tension hopefully blooms from the psychological exploration of each character and how they interact in a modern social setting. All the films that informed this approach peel away the layers of ‘civilized’ life to revel in the power struggles of social interaction and explore the barely suppressed rage polite smiling people feel towards each other. White Lotus recently did this brilliantly, and I love the ‘dramedy’ of Mike White’s work, how his scenes veer between comedy and drama in the way they milk the horrors of every social interaction between the characters.”

With the screenplay completed, the production of Speak No Evil quickly kicked into high gear in 2023, as the SAG-AFTRA labor strike loomed on the horizon. “This was a fairly rapid start from reading the script to moving into production,” producer Paul Ritchie says. “James is a fantastic collaborator and listener; everyone feels part of the process. Over the years we’ve built up a great amount of trust, which is such a valuable commodity. We’ve been fortunate to work on projects where the chemistry of the teams we’ve put together has enhanced the show and created a successful platform for us to grow from. Our first discussions were centered on how we could breathe our style of filmmaking into the movie, with cast and locations being crucial to that vision.”

THE CHARACTERS

Paddy
James McAvoy

Paddy presents himself as a former big city physician and old-fashioned manly man with carnal appetites and strong opinions about everything. He rejects pretentiously “woke” liberalism and rat-race careerism for a simpler life, living free and unfettered in the wilds of rural England with his wife and young son. But Paddy’s iconoclastic individualism belies a dark undertow of resentment and covetousness that will eventually crash to the surface.

To play the psychologically subterranean Paddy, director James Watkins turned to James McAvoy, the acclaimed Scottish actor of stage and screen and famed for playing telepathic superhero Charlies Xavier in the X-Men film franchise and the mentally ill Kevin Wendell Crumb in the Blumhouse blockbusters Split and Glass. “Paddy must charm us even while being on the edge of horrifying us, and James knows how to walk that line,” Watkins says. “I watched him in the film Filth and was mesmerized: his character is horrible, but James somehow takes us with him. A lesser actor would have lost us. As well as a movie star, James is a brilliant stage actor. Exploring Paddy, he not only mines his own experience but taps into a deep well of classical resources: Iago, Richard III, Mephistopheles. I don’t think anyone else in the world could have played Paddy as well as James. His understanding of psychological and emotional space—of mapping tiny shifts on an emotional gradient—is second to none. He was the first and only actor I approached.”

McAvoy was immediately intrigued. “Blumhouse has done so many kinds of movies, but they’re mostly known for the horror genre, and they’re exceptionally good at it,” says McAvoy. “But reading the script, what kept me going after page three was the fact that these characters felt like real people and that it was based on things that we can recognize in the real world. The film is constantly playing with what's acceptable and what’s not acceptable and the dangers we risk when we choose to put up with degrading behavior or conditions because we don’t believe we deserve better, or don’t believe things can get better, or just don’t know how to think or talk about these things anymore.”

When it came to Paddy, McAvoy was fascinated by the character’s many meanings and layers, particularly his embodiment of retrograde masculinity. “Paddy holds to an older, traditionalist expression of manhood,” says McAvoy. “James Watkins and I really leaned into that aspect of him as we fleshed out who Paddy is and what he means to the story and to the culture, giving him some mythic heft with timely resonance. Here’s this man’s man, beholden to some ancient idea of masculinity, living in the countryside, living off the land, or so you think. It all seems so wholesome and earthy. And yet this is ancient England that we’re talking about, and there’s darkness in the land; there’s a history of violence and bloodshed and horrible things in that dirt, and so there’s evil in that earthy masculinity that he’s romanticizing and selling.”

McAvoy discovered more dimensions in the part as he and co-star Aisling Franciosi worked with Watkins to create the relationship between Paddy and his wife, Ciara. “Paddy and Ciara are this crazy couple, perhaps literally, with unspeakable passions, and they are seen initially by the Daltons—Ben, and to a lesser degree Louise—as this beacon of hope and light in their lost lives and suffering marriage. This pointed to a kernel of truth about Paddy and Ciara that there’s in script, but we excavated even more in rehearsals and on set: Yes, they are despicable in so many ways. But they love each other, and their love is true and even wholesome. So, you've got these baddies who really love each other, and you've got these goodies who kind of don't even know how to explore or express love anymore, for various reasons, because of issues in their relationship or because modern society has made them question how love is even supposed to work. Recognizing those themes and cultivating them made for rich relationships and conflict.”

Paddy’s provocative and powerful personality made him a fun character to play, says McAvoy, but he was always mindful of finding the proper tone for the character. “Paddy is incredibly entertaining and he’s always performing,” McAvoy says. “But you have to be careful playing a character like that, because then it can become a showy turn, and while that could be very effective for an audience, it doesn’t necessarily have a lot of truth to it. We were always working to ground the character in real history, motivation and desire, and to earn the revelations of his true nature. As much as Paddy is this likably mercurial, counter-cultural figure, there’s real darkness in him, and it’s always there for the audience to see. If there’s a way in which this movie is like a classic horror movie, it’s that part where the audience is yelling at the characters ‘Don’t go down that dark corridor!’ and yet they can’t stop going down it. The difference here is that the dark corridor isn’t literal. It’s Paddy and Ciara.”

Louise Dalton
Mackenzie Davis

Louise Dalton finds herself unhappy and unfulfilled in all aspects of her life and is at a loss for how to change. When Louise, her husband Ben and their daughter Agnes relocated to London for Ben’s job, Louise thought she’d be able to continue her successful career in public relations; instead, it fizzled out. An anxious helicopter parent, her relationship with her daughter is just as fraught and tense as her relationship with her husband. While not as enthusiastic about visiting Paddy and Ciara in the country as Ben is, Louise goes along with it, anyway, motivated, in part, by a longing to rekindle what they have lost in their relationship. . But she immediately sees that Paddy’s farm is not a safe place for her family, and she becomes increasingly suspicious that there’s something seriously messed-up about their hosts.

Playing Louise is Mackenzie Davis (Terminator: Dark Fate, Station Eleven), who starred with Scoot McNairy in the critically acclaimed AMC series Halt and Catch Fire. “From when I first met Mackenzie, I knew she would be a great creative partner and challenge the material to be as truthful and psychologically real as possible,” says director James Watkins. “Mackenzie has a singular presence on film. It’s very hard to quantify; you just want to watch her, to lean in. The highest praise I can give is that there coexists a fragility and a power on screen that reminds me of young Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle’s gaze.”

For Davis, what was most captivating about Speak No Evil was its blend of darkly comedic social satire and violent genre horror and how the one organically led into the other. “What was interesting to me about the script was how it captured just how excruciating it can be to navigate awkward social spaces and how that can feel like a life-or-death scenario,” Davis says. “What’s ingenious about the story is that the figurative tension becomes quite literal: it’s like eighty percent of the movie is exploring a series of social missteps and their consequences, and the natural horror that comes with that, and then the last twenty percent becomes a full-fledged horror film. I also loved that the movie explores the tension between fear, instinct and empathy.”

Davis also loved how the film examines when, and why, we choose to ignore our instincts, even at the risk of real danger. “We encounter people all the time who are different from us or have different values, but they don’t set off any alarm bells,” Davis says. “Yet what do you when you meet that person who’s different, but something inside you is telling you to run? Do you trust that your instinct is sound and protecting you from danger? Do you question it and wonder if it’s unreasonable or prejudiced? Do you convince yourself you’re being rude and work harder at empathy? The movie cleverly raises these nuanced questions by dramatizing them in a heightened way that turns into a real thriller. The characters keep making these choices that put them in danger, not out of stupidity but because of this implicit social contract we all live by: to be polite, to be empathetic, to be so understanding that you neuter your instincts.”

Louise embodies that internal conflict more than any other character in Speak No Evil, and her choices are further complicated by issues of gender, which Davis also found interesting to play. “The other adults in the movie are easy-going and light or just willfully ignoring troubling realities, but she’s got a lot of anxiety that no one shares or appreciates,” Davis says. “Worse, when she risks giving voice to it, she’s dressed down for it and made to feel ashamed. I think that’s a very relatable experience, especially for women, who often find themselves in these spaces where they’re constantly negotiating with their intuition and their fears about how they’re being perceived. Louise is something of a helicopter mom, and perhaps she’s overly anxious, but the fundamental irony is that this over-protectiveness ends up being her source of strength.”

Davis relished the scenes in which Louise becomes the fighter that her husband and daughter need, and the realistic way in which Watkins approached them.

Ben Dalton
Scoot McNairy

Like many American men, Ben Dalton defines himself and his worth by what he does for a living, and unfortunately, as Speak No Evil begins, he’s doing nothing. Once a financial controller for a Chicago company, Ben moved his family to London to advance his career by opening an overseas office, only to get laid off shortly after arrival because of a corporate pivot triggered by an economic downturn. Unemployed and falling behind in the rat race as he enters middle age, stuck in a stagnating marriage with his wife, Louise, and struggling to connect with his daughter, Agnes, Ben is all kinds of emasculated and impotent when Paddy enters Ben’s life and captures his imagination, triggering Ben’s desire to feel like a “man” again.

To play Ben, director James Watkins cast Scoot McNairy, whose diverse body of work includes acclaimed turns such film as Monsters, Argo, 12 Years a Slave, and TV’s True Detective and Narcos: Mexico. “I’ve long been a fan of Scott McNairy,” Watkins says. “He’s an actor’s actor. I love his understatement, how he captures so much with so little, and how he’s prepared to shed vanity to look weak or unlikeable. He was keen to explore Ben’s ‘beta male’ status—to do the work to excavate what informs this behavior—not to excuse it, but to understand it, to peel back the psychological layers.”

McNairy came to Speak No Evil having seen and admired its Danish precursor and intrigued by Watkins’ vision for this new adaptation. “James dug deeper into all the things that I admired about Gæsterne and really explored the theme of politeness in the face of tricky social situations—what’s acceptable, what’s not, what do you speak out against, what do you keep quiet about—while ultimately resolving all those conflicts in a different but equally interesting way,” McNairy says. “You come to care about the characters because you’re intrigued or even moved by their very complicated humanity. It makes this material different from every other horror movie. It delivers what you expect from a thriller, but it takes you by surprise with its richness.”

Most compelling to McNairy was the arc Watkins had crafted for Ben, a cautionary tale about a bitter, muddled man whose unexamined self and flawed conceptions of personal worth render him ripe for exploitation, endangering not only himself, but also his wife and child and potentially others, too. “I think when people are weak and vulnerable, they’re open to anything that they think will better them or change them,” says McNairy. “When we pick up with Ben, he’s a man who’s lost his job and his confidence and is trying to find himself. He meets Paddy, this exuberant personality who’s so sure of himself, who fishes and hunts and does all these rural, masculine things that Ben doesn’t do but maybe wishes he could do. What really makes Paddy so attractive to Ben, though, is Paddy’s utter confidence. It’s very infectious, and Ben comes to think that the answer to his soul-sickness is, ‘If I could be more like Paddy, my whole life would be better; I’ll be fixed.’ Paddy sees that, manipulates that, and toys with that.”

Ciara
Aisling Franciosi

Paddy’s wife, Ciara, is his better half and secret weapon: a warm, inviting personality that softens his rough edges and helps bait his victims. They seem to be a perfect match, but whether Ciara is a wholly willing accomplice in Paddy’s schemes and is truly enamored with him is one of the film’s compelling mysteries.

Portraying Ciara is Irish actress Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale, The Unforgivable) who recently voyaged into the horror genre with 2023’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter. “I’d seen Aisling in The Nightingale and was blown away,” director James Watkins says. “I thought she would work brilliantly as Paddy’s somewhat younger wife and spar terrifically with James McAvoy. Aisling totally understood this ambiguity to Ciara. She’s totally on the journey with Paddy, but is she, in some way, a victim too? And I loved how she understood Paddy and Ciara as a team. To that end, she and James worked so well together that James started having Ciara finish some of Paddy’s lines, like she’s heard his little aphorisms a thousand times before.”

Franciosi says she was drawn to Speak No Evil’s darkly comic and provocative exploration of social mores as well as the challenge of playing the nuances of Ciara. “I think this movie is about the perils of social conventions and the pitfalls of keeping up appearances. It explores the extremes of what can happen when we ignore our gut instincts for the sake of being polite,” Franciosi says. “The first time I read the script, I found myself squirming at the social awkwardness of the interactions between the two couples and then horrified as the story descended into a nightmare situation. I just thought it made for great drama and interesting social commentary.”

She also was eager to explore Ciara’s elusive undercurrents. “I have played a couple of, I would say, mentally unstable characters before, but Ciara is quite a different character for me,” Franciosi says. “I love how she presents one way but is very much another way underneath it all. She comes across as very warm and unthreatening. Just a lovely young woman, a caring mother and a loving wife. She’s a great balance to Paddy’s boisterousness, which is important in getting the Daltons—Louise and Ben—to warm to them. She’s hiding terrible secrets but there’s complexity to her deception. She’s complcicit and culpabale, but she’s also a victim. She’s become who she is through terrible of trauma and long-term abuse. The question of how culpable a victim could be was very interesting to me. I also wanted to present a version of Ciara who is very much in love with Paddy but whose goals are not necessarily the same as Paddy’s.”

The prickling terror of the film, Franciosi says, was achieved by grounding the characters in reality. “It’s terrifying because the story and storytelling takes great pains to earn the idea that this could really happen,” Franciosi says. “I do think that the way in which Paddy and Ciara’s relationship is portrayed is quite enthralling. They love each other and there's palpable chemistry, but they are also both, clearly, psychologically disturbed and are caught in a loop of troubling violence. It’s disturbing to watch, but you also can't help but want to keep looking at them.”

Agnes Dalton
Alix West Lefler

Ben and Louise’s daughter, Agnes, is a smart and sensitive tween who keenly feels the tensions in her parents’ relationship – tensions that happen to include disagreement over how to parent her and help her manage her anxiety. Agnes goes nowhere without her comfort bunny, Hoppy, but she is by no means weak and helpless, and in fact, she has much to offer her parents as they navigate their conflict with Paddy and Ciara— if they would just take her seriously and listen to her.

To play Agnes, director James Watkins cast Alix West Lefler, whose credits include 2022’s The Good Nurse and stints on such TV series as Riverdale and My Life with the Walter Boys. “All the adult actors are so subtle that I was looking for child actors that had similar refinement, who would not ‘act’ but be the character,” Watkins says. “That was Alix. When she auditioned, what really popped was her truthfulness. Sometimes child actors come into auditions with one brilliant performance and blow you away because they’ve really prepared for it. But on a film set, where everything is so fluid, you need a child actor who can dig deeper in the moment, who can take direction and go with the flow of the scene and the other performers. Alix did this wonderfully. She was able to deftly capture Agnes’ anxiety and vulnerability.”

Mackenzie Davis, who plays Agnes’s mother, Louise, was so impressed by Lefler that she gave her a nickname. “I nicknamed her ‘Blue Ivy,’ after Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s daughter,” Davis says. “If you’ve ever seen Blue Ivy dance at her mother’s concerts, she’s just like the most unbothered, talented child, neither scared nor impressed by the world that she’s in. Alix is the same way. She’s her own person: fully grounded, so smart, so easy with what she does, and such a joy to work with.”

For Lefler, the appeal of Speak No Evil was simple. “I love action. I love horrors. I love gore, too!” Lefler says. “I had so much fun doing it all.” But she took seriously the work of portraying a girl with real mental health issues; much of Lefler’s preparation was in service of understanding Agnes’s issues and portraying them authentically. “Agnes has a lot of anxiety and does a ton of breathing exercises to help with her panic,” says Lefler. “So, I did research into what it’s like to have that kind of intense anxiety and what it looks like to have a panic attack. It was important for me to understand what it means to have that kind of mental health and emotional issue pulling you, affecting your personality and impacting you as you move through life.” Lefler adds that she could relate to Agnes in one very significant way: Lefler, too, has a comfort bunny. “I actually have a bunny at home from the last movie that I did, The King Tide,” Lefler says. “It was just randomly on the set. I'm like, ‘Hey, this is cute, I’m claiming it.’ I took it home and it sits in my room with other pieces of film memorabilia that give me such good memories, inspiration and comfort.”

Ant
Dan Hough

Ant is Paddy and Ciara’s shy, enigmatic young son, normal in every way except that he is mute — the result of aglossia, a genetic condition that left him with a partial, deformed tongue. He befriends the Daltons’ daughter, Agnes, but it’s not always clear whether his furtive, odd behavior is a byproduct of his condition or is masking some other motivation.

To play Ant, director James Watkins cast Dan Hough, who makes his professional acting debut with Speak No Evil. “Ant represents a singular acting challenge: to communicate convincingly, non-verbally; to communicate gesturally, without ever ‘acting,’” says Watkins. “Dan has never acted on camera before. But he brought an inner truth. In auditions, he lived the moment, rather than tried to act it. There’s an inner pain and rage that must come out at the end. This moment was what I auditioned with. When he screamed on a camera test, he gave us all the shivers. He really went there. Feral and ferocious. He couldn’t speak for three days afterwards.”

For any actor’s first role, it’s a doozy. “Ant’s a very sad kid, for specific reasons that you come to understand,” Hough says. “The only way I could get into Ant is just to ask: What if everything that has happened to this kid happened to me? That's how I got into the character. It was challenging because you have to figure out how to express yourself in different ways, through body language and expressions. And I had to wear a prosthetic, a little plate that fit around my teeth and my tongue slid right under it. But it was always an amazing experience, from beginning to end. This is my first film. It was my first audition. It was a whirlwind of opportunities. I just loved it.”

His adult co-stars were caught off guard by the intensity and depth of his work. “Dan is probably the cutest boy I've ever seen in my life,” says Mackenzie Davis. “He’s silent for the entire movie and his character exists a lot on the periphery of scenes, so it was often easy for the rest of us to not really pay attention to what he was doing. But then you watch him on the playback and you marvel at what he’s conveying with this extraordinary, heartbreaking silent performance: his sadness, his internal world, his yearning. It’s a beautiful piece of work, and even more impressive when you realize it’s his first job.”

THE PRODUCTION DESIGN AND LOCATIONS

Writer-director James Watkins says that, other than casting, no creative choice was more important to the success of Speak No Evil than securing the right rural locale to play the role of Paddy and Ciara’s charming-on-the-outside/shabby-on-the-inside farmstead, situated near a small lake on a spread of Eden-esque English countryside. “There’s a constant push-pull in the script: for every warning sign about Paddy and Ciara, there’s a corresponding beat that is charming and potentially freeing: Red light, green light,” Watkins says. “Paddy’s farm and the landscape around it serves this idea and expresses it. It is life-affirming to wander through these beautiful valleys and enjoy Paddy’s woodcraft as he makes fire with his bare hands, even as other details, some quite subtle, are causes for anxiety if not alarm.”

Helping Watkins envision Paddy’s deceptively insidious idyll was Oscar® winning production designer James Price, who first worked with the director on The Ipcress Files. Watkins and Price briefly considered building a farm that could meet the needs of the script, but it didn’t feel correct given the aesthetic Watkins desired for the film, so he and Price decided they would use existing locations and modify them as necessary. Throughout his design work, Price drew upon memories of growing up on a farm in the English countryside along the Welsh borders, thick with history and eerie atmosphere. “Most of the design was inspired by places I knew as a kid, the farm I grew up on, farms where my mates lived, weird houses and ancient structures, places of you would never want to be on your own after dark,” says Price with a laugh. “It really was a chance to explore some of the darker things in my memory.”

Finding the right place was no easy feat. “The trickiest part was finding the perfect location that we were able to occupy and make our own for five months,” producer Paul Ritchie says. “With the SAG-AFTRA strike looming it was a challenge to get everything up and moving quickly, whilst maintaining the quality. This is where the shorthand with James, from years of working together, came in very useful and enabled us to move with speed.”

After considering dozens of options for Paddy’s farm, the filmmakers, with the help of location manager TED LADLOW (assistant location manager, Killing Eve; Good Grief), chose a farm on a secluded and sprawling gated property in Gloucestershire, England—about an hour’s drive from where Price grew up in North Herefordshire. The main house was a 400-year-old structure with a timber frame and stone brickwork.Additional barnyard buildings included a cellar ideally suited for scenes set in Paddy’s subterranean storeroom. Watkins says he liked how, together, “they formed an enclosed courtyard that could look both protective and imprisoning, evoking a Medieval castle keep or a prison courtyard.”

“It was perfectly idyllic and creepy at the same time,” says Ladlow. “The property had all these lovely vistas, but it had dark spaces and various features that imbued it with sinister undercurrents. Not that there’s anything evil about the place, to be clear. The farm’s owners—a brother and sister who grew up there—are lovely. They even used to host school visits to the old outbuilding barn, teaching children about old farming techniques from the 1700s and 1800s. With some of the funds they received from filming, they plan to renovate the barn and reopen the farm for the local schools and community.”

The main house did present a couple of production challenges. The rooms were very small. While this enhanced the feeling of claustrophobia, some spaces, specifically in the critical upstairs area, were just too tiny to accommodate cast and crew and equipment. But the owners of the property gave Watkins and his team permission to knock down walls and reconfigure the space as needed. Additionally, the roof couldn’t support a major action sequence in the film, so Watkins shot those scenes on a raised set replicating the roof that was built on the lawn outside the main house. Because the property lacked a small lake (or “large pond,” depending on who’s talking about it), the production hired a company that works for England’s Forestry Commission to make one. The farm’s owners liked it so much, they’ve kept it, and it has since been designated as a suitable habitat for newts, which, apparently, West England needs more of. “So, we actually created a good thing for the environment, which is pretty amazing, really,” says Price.

Price and his art department sought to decorate the farmhouse with disconcerting details, some of which were integrated into the set only for the cast to see and may go unnoticed by the audience. These details included Dutch Delftware tiles in the kitchen with images of people beheaded or hanging from trees, or peeling wallpaper of banal design revealing older wallpaper underneath, printed with clusters of eyeballs. Price charged set decorator PRUE HOWARD (assistant set decorator, Murder on the Orient Express; Justice League) and her team with the mission of cluttering the house with odd antiques and knickknacks common to the shops of rural seaside England. While the display is mostly haphazard, some objects are positioned with subtle, sinister purpose: the house is full of little figurines, hundreds of them, and they’re all facing away from the center of the room or toward the wall, as if averting their eyes or even hiding.

All of that detail was a boon for the cast. “The set designers did an incredible job,” says Scoot McNairy, who plays Ben Dalton. “There was nothing in that house when they began pre-production and they decorated it with all this amazing detail. The tiles in the kitchen are all painted with these country motifs, like flowers or wagons, but if you look more closely, you’ll see some have sinister touches, like a guy hanging from a tree. The whole house was saturated with banal decor, interspersed here and there with something odd or unsettling. They did an amazing job of creating a space that set a mood for the cast and helped the performances.”

Beyond Gloucestershire, Watkins shot in Herefordshire, Devon, and London. Playing the role of Tuscany in Speak No Evil’s opening scenes is Groznjan, Croatia.

THE CINEMATOGRAPHY

To help create Speak No Evil’s visual aesthetic, writer-director James Watkins enlisted cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones, who also lensed Watkins’ The Woman in Black and Watkins’ Black Mirror episode “Shut Up and Dance”. “I wanted the film to feel real and natural, not a genre confection,” says Watkins. “As inspirations, Tim and I talked a lot about Fargo and Jaws, how both created believable and tangible worlds and used raw, naturalistic light and minimal-yet- strategic artificial light. We also looked to the films of Michael Haneke and Stanley Kubrick. Given the key themes of social anxiety and awkwardness, our camera style reflects a very deliberate tension between keeping a cold, clinical Kubrickian distance, then jumping in and identifying ourselves with these characters in their awkwardness in a very subjective way, then stepping back again.”Speak No Evil was shot with Arri’s Alexa 35 digital cameras, but Watkins says he wanted “a rawer texture closer to film. We roughed up the digital look with diffusion filters in front of the lens, filtering the light before it gets to the sensor. We used a texture setting—“soft nostalgia”—to further strip away any digital plasticity and get an earthier look.”

Watkins and Maurice-Jones developed different approaches to lighting the film’s three major settings: Tuscany, London and West England. The three locations, taken together, help tell the emotional story of the Dalton family. “We start in the dreamy light of Italy—soft light, rim light, backlight—a lovely glow with warm and beautiful tonalities,” Watkins says. “We shot this with anamorphic lenses for dreamy flares and romance. London is cooler: grey, starker, hard lines, more muted color, all reflecting the hibernation of Ben and Louise’s marriage. We switched to spherical lenses for the West England farm: less light refraction, more immediacy. The farmhouse light starts with warm tungsten and log fires but cools as the film progresses, ending in cold moonlight. The contrast ratio subtly increases, with the limited fill on faces maintaining a sense of duality as characters hold the light and the dark at the same time.”

Maurice-Jones and his team also used various lenses to capture distinct visual atmospheres throughout the film. They utilized Vintage C Series Anamorphics for scenes requiring dreamy flares and romance. In London, where a cooler palette was desired, they opted for Modern Atlas Anamorphics, achieving a clean, hard look that emphasized the grey stark hard lines of the city’s atmosphere. For the West England scenes, they switched to Vintage Spherical Lenses Cannon K 35s to capture the unique ambiance of the rural setting.

Watkins ran long, extended takes of scenes in wide shots. “Our 2:35 wide aspect ratio allowed us to stage scenes to visually represent isolation and separation of characters,” Watkins says. “We designed production spaces, especially in the farmhouse, with its low ceilings and old beams ‘cutting the frame’ to enhance this oppressive sense of characters divided. The camera only moves when motivated and purposeful. Likewise, with a more minimalist cutting style. Close-ups are saved for pivotal and subjective moments.”

THE PROPS AND PROSTHETICS

Arguably the most disturbing horrific image in Speak No Evil is the sight of Ant’s diminished, misshapen tongue. The prosthetic worn by child actor Dan Hough was designed, fitted and sculpted by CHRIS LYONS and his team at FANGS FX. FANGS FX specializes in creating lifelike mouth prosthetics for film and television. Makeup artist NICOLE STAFFORD enlisted Lyons for his decades of expertise in realistic mouthpieces. Lyons, with over 30 years of experience, has worked on hundreds of productions, including the Harry Potter series, Game of Thrones and he designed the iconic teeth worn by Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody. The custom mouthpiece for Hough was designed to fit comfortably and appear lifelike on camera, effectively concealing the actor’s real tongue. A small plate was fitted around Hough’s teeth and his actual tongue slipped underneath it, hidden. The design of the mouthpiece allowed for easy application and removal, and it was augmented with digital animation to produce the saliva and movement in post-production.

As for Agnes’s comfort bunny, Hoppy, you won’t find it in stores; the stuffed animal was custom-made for the production. But it took time to get Hoppy right, as it carries so much symbolic weight in the movie. “It was more complicated than I imagined it would be,” says director James Watkins. “We went through several iterations, trying to get the right tongue and eyes. Hoppy is a character and needs the right amount of anthropomorphic personality, evolving from a beloved old toy who Agnes hasn’t grown out of to something else entirely. By the end of the film, Hoppy is emblematic of the whole family, battered, bloody, struggling on.”