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Reviews
Speak No Evil (2022)
Slow-Burn Thriller Expertly Executed
When a Danish family visits a Dutch family they've met on holiday, what are easily brushed aside as cultural differences charge the battery in the slow-burn horror that is Speak No Evil. The psychological and social horror that that characterize this movie won't be for everyone, but it is expertly executed. Think Get Out meets Cape Fear.
Rather than rely on jump scares and on following tropes, the director and co-writer of Speak No Evil, Christian Tafdrup, employs careful strategy and tactics that will haunt the viewer for long after the film ends. Playing on core fears that we are embarrassed to speak aloud and using our expectations both of culture and of genre films to build tension, Christian Tafdrup and his co-writer Mads Tafdrup direct the audience toward what we should expect, what we know is coming, and then withhold it from us. Their game is to hold off as long as possible and then to smash us over the head with the results. And they are successful. The Tafdrups use subtlety and audience anticipation to build tension throughout the film, and then they shock us in a truly horrific gut punch.
It's tough not to give away details that would do damage to the experience of an unknowing audience member, but what the pair offered in a Q&A after the film's debut screening at Sundance this January is telling without being unhelpfully revelatory. Christian Tafdrup told audiences that he came up with the idea for his film when considering those times when we meet others on holiday and invariably those with whom we get along best might offer to have us come for a visit in their home country some day. Tafdrup imagines a family accepting such an offer and asks: "Just how badly can this go for them?" In writing the screenplay, he took that question and paired it with a second, more internal fear: "What if I can't protect my family?" Take those two questions and let their answers play out in a context in which the guest family has incentive to be gracious and friendly toward hosts who, when it appears that something nefarious is afoot, perhaps they misunderstand. And how far does the benefit of the doubt for a kind host with imperfect social graces extend? Speak No Evil offers one answer.
The Settlers (2016)
Seen at Sundance screening; thought-provoking. No spoilers here unless you don't know what settlers are and don't wish to find out until you see the film...
The movie ran long: over two hours, and maybe closer to three than two. I'm not sure, though. I was immersed. The filmography was beautiful and immersive. The interviews, despite being entirely presented in subtitles for we English speakers/readers, were compelling, as was the story the director was telling. The film is partly historical storytelling and partly political analysis. It asks questions rather than attempts to offer any solutions, as the director said in a Q&A afterward. It depicts the birth of what you might call the modern Zionist movement, at least as it expresses itself in the outpost settlements in occupied territory outside of sovereign Israel. The interviews are with people placed high and low in the settlement communities and in universities in Israel, and they present a stark and worrying portrait: Israeli settlers, though a minority of the Israeli population, are a destabilizing force that has run unchecked because of politicians' fears of facing up to their ardent beliefs as espoused by devoted followers. The moderates of the country are mute in the film, and they can't be much louder in reality, given the extent to which the settlers have been permitted by their government to run roughshod over laws that the country itself, let alone international agreements, have set in place. The film worried me, and the picture of a new Apartheid it presented is vivid.