In ‘Speak No Evil,’ James McAvoy Proves That The Nice Young Scottish Man Audiences First Fell In Love With Is Long Gone

At some point, James McAvoy seemed like a nice young man. He played at least a few of them, at least: love interests to Christina Ricci and Anne Hathaway, and it sure wasn’t fair, what happened to his character in Atonement, was it? Even playing a somewhat more self-regarding, flirtatious Charles Xavier in the X-Men prequels fit with his clean-cut-charmer image without succumbing to pure boyishness. (A righteous superhero who relies entirely on his intelligence and empathy!) In other words, he was succeeding where other nice-seeming U.K. boys like Jim Sturgess or Nicholas Hoult hadn’t, quite. Then, at some point, the beast came out – literally, in the case of Split, the M. Night Shyamalan thriller where he played a serial killer with dissociative identity disorder, whose personalities include an animalistic side called the Beast. That beastliness re-emerges in the horror remake Speak No Evil, not by reprising the character, but by turning McAvoy into another heaving, feral baddie.

Paddy (McAvoy) doesn’t seem that way at first, at least not to Ben (Scoot McNairy), who meets Paddy while vacationing in Italy with his wife Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and their tween daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler). Compared to some of the dull couples they encounter, and maybe also compared to Ben and Louise’s own simmering dysfunction, Paddy, his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and their mute son Ant (Dan Hough) seem charmingly freewheeling and unburdened by worry. The two families strike up a vacation friendship; Louse is a bit warier than her husband, but Ben enjoys his time with Paddy enough that he wants to accept an invitation for a weekend visit at the other family’s remote-country home. Louise, seeking to appease Ben, agrees.

Speak No Evil is a remake, close until it’s not, of a 2022 Dutch film, sort of a comedy-turned-nightmare of manners. The hook is that the central family puts up with discomfiting and increasingly unhinged behavior from their new friends out of politeness, staying on their unpleasant weekend visit far past the point of reason (and eventually putting themselves in danger), just to avoid making an awkward scene. To this sociological experiment, the remake adds one new wrinkle, via McAvoy: The conceit that part of Paddy’s particular charisma is a strain of alpha-male philosophizing that both appeals to and cows Ben, who feels inadequate due to his recent joblessness and some other personal issues.

The 2024 Speak No Evil doesn’t quite bring this good idea off, often using it as an excuse to soften the horrors of the earlier film. The only reason it almost works, and might keep audiences attentive even as it descends into pretty typical action-horror clashes, is McAvoy’s genuine unpredictability. At first, Paddy seems mildly and charmingly laddish, a down-to-earth doctor without as many hang-ups as Ben – almost a mirrored caricature of what a boisterous American is supposed to be, rather than Ben’s glum, put-upon expat. McAvoy has mentioned modeling the character on Andrew Tate types, but his actual performance is more nuanced than that, capturing the kind of grab-baggy collection of absurd beliefs people may be more likely to accept from someone of supposedly lofty social standing. (The mere fact that Paddy claims to be a doctor lends flimsy credence to his enthusiasm for meat-eating, “cold-water therapy,” and physical aggression in general.)

As Paddy becomes less adept at hiding his true nature, McAvoy often appears to be emo-hulking out – tears well up in his glassy eyes, his body lumbering around in drunkenness, and eventually transforming into a bellowing monster not so different from the Beast. It feels like he’s transforming his whole persona.

But maybe that transformation came earlier even than Split. In Trance, a 2013 Danny Boyle thriller, McAvoy is positioned more or less like Ewan McGregor or Cillian Murphy as the movie’s likable center, only to reveal a hidden nastiness even his character has forgotten (he’s a thief with amnesia). He’s similarly, deceptively rotten in Atomic Blonde. The contrast becomes more explicit with his supervillain turns for Shyamalan, both of which coincided, almost too perfectly, with later-period X-Men movies: Split with X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016, and Glass with Dark Phoenix in 2019, giving him a strange yin-yang effect where he’s able to play the authoritative mutant guru weakened by his own arrogance, and the beastly killer undermined by his more sympathetic alternate personalities. (He’s even bald, or nearly so, in all of the movies for visual symmetry across movies, and also with Bruce Willis’s superhero character who faces off with him in Glass.) It seems plausible that his X-Men co-star Hoult has been following his lead, coming to specialize in hapless-doofus parts rather than gentle romantic leads.

Speak No Evil, then, should be McAvoy’s biggest showcase since Split. But he’s almost too big and scary for the movie around him, an immediate showpiece performance in a story that feels designed to burn slower. Perhaps understanding that at least a few viewers will have already seen the original film, the remake doesn’t work especially hard to disguise Paddy’s menace; it’s pretty much entirely up to McAvoy to feint toward his handsome-leading-man past, despite having now played the villain just as often. He does an admirable job anyway, while the movie itself doesn’t seem quite sure of how to navigate around his presence. Should it go for dark social comedy? Personality-driven psycho horror? Rather than mixing tones – which McAvoy himself does well, at times making tantalizingly it unclear how much Paddy is acting – the movie feels like it’s compromising between them. (It’s the kind of horror movie that’s ultimately rated R more for language and the description of possible violence than much of anything that actually happens onscreen.) McAvoy reveals the seething instability beneath Paddy’s alpha exterior, but the movie doesn’t give him much chance to use the exterior itself to provocative ends. It just waits to unleash his bloody fury. The actor has successfully left the nice young man behind – which means in a movie like Speak No Evil, the audience can see him coming from miles off.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.