Actor James McAvoy goes to the dark side again in Speak No Evil

SAN DIEGO – It is possible to be too polite and trusting of strangers.

That is the chilling premise of the horror film Speak No Evil, which opens in Singapore cinemas on Sept 12. It follows an American family who visit the home of a British family they befriended on holiday.

But what looks set to be an idyllic weekend on a beautiful country estate quickly turns into a psychological nightmare as their host tests them in sinister ways.

A remake of the 2022 Danish film of the same name, which won acclaim for its exploration of social niceties, the film stars James McAvoy as host Paddy, and Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy as Louise and Ben Dalton, his unsuspecting American guests.

McAvoy, 45, has played men with dark sides before, notably in M. Night Shyamalan’s psychological thrillers Split (2016) and Glass (2019), in which his character had multiple personalities.

But this still felt like a fresh challenge for the Scottish star, who also portrayed Charles Xavier/Professor X in the X-Men superhero movies (2011 to 2019).

“The thing I got most excited about was walking a line between being somebody the audience is enjoying spending time watching and then is repulsed by the next second, and almost being able to toy with the audience.

“That’s something I always enjoy doing, and have been lucky enough to do a few times in my career,” says the actor after Speak No Evil’s screening at Comic-Con International in San Diego, California, earlier in 2024.

“And knowing that I’ll be able to entertain you guys and then make you feel really bad about the fact that you enjoyed watching something,” he adds.

“Because one second, it was enjoyable, and the next minute, it’s absolutely repugnant as well. That kind of makes you judge yourself as an audience, hopefully, on some level. Maybe not even consciously, but on a kind of physical level,” he says.

McAvoy’s co-star Davis, 37, says she enjoyed exploring the awkwardness of the social situation the Daltons find themselves in.

“I thought it was so deeply uncomfortable, knowing what it feels like to be so unsure about what the right move is in any situation,” says the Canadian actress, who appeared in the award-winning 2016 San Junipero episode of science-fiction anthology series Black Mirror (2011 to present).

“To not know if you’re going to be the hero if you stand up for your family, or if you’re going to be a bigot because you didn’t understand the situation of the people you’re talking to – that’s quite a relatable condition that we’re all in.

“And trying to be sensitive and intuitive can sometimes fight against each other,” she adds.

“I thought that was really fun, and rich stuff to mine,” says Davis, who played the lead in the post-apocalyptic miniseries Station Eleven (2011 to 2022).

The fact that Speak No Evil was shot almost entirely chronologically meant the cast also found themselves caught slightly off-guard when things took a dark turn.

Davis says: “It was really unusual... There was so much of the movie where I was, like, ‘I don’t think this is a horror film.’ We were just hanging out and having uncomfortable dinner parties.”

Writer-director James Watkins says he greatly admired the original movie, which had a Danish family going to stay with a Dutch couple.

But he wanted to put a new spin on it.

“By having American protagonists and setting it in England, I thought we could create something slightly different, with a different energy, and explore different things,” says the 51-year-old English film-maker, who directed the thriller Eden Lake (2008).

The original “is very much about how the social contract works – how we react with each other, how propriety and good manners (work)”, he explains.

“I thought we could explore that, but I also thought it’d be interesting to explore what happens when you get to a point beyond polite society – when all the rules are broken down and nobody’s hiding any more – and how people behave in that environment.”

Speak No Evil opens in Singapore cinemas on Sept 12.