Speak No Evil review: 'James McAvoy lets rip with a performance of menacing unpredictability'

Speak No Evil | Universal

Speak No Evil (15) ★★★★☆

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A) ★★★☆☆

The Critic (15) ★★☆☆☆

Presumably through choice, James McAvoy hasn’t taken on a leading role in a big mainstream movie since 2019’s Stephen King blockbuster It: Chapter Two. It’s good, then, to see him return to the big screen proper in psychological horror film Speak No Evil, not least because it gives him a chance to once again plough a darker furrow with the virtuosic range he brought to bear on the daffy M Night Shyamalan super-villain movie Split and the grubby Irvine Welsh adaptation Filth. 

Like Edward Norton, McAvoy is the sort of actor who can track a character’s moment-to-moment personality switches and make them believable no matter the heightened circumstances of the plot. In Speak No Evil - a remake of a 2022 Danish thriller - he does this with hair-trigger precision as the extroverted, alpha-male half of a British couple who befriend a London-based American family on holiday and coerce them into visiting their Devonshire farm when they’re all back in Blighty. 

In its early stages, writer/director James Watkins (Eden Lake) slyly exploits the awkwardness of a holiday friendship extended beyond its natural endpoint, with McAvoy’s gregarious, extroverted Paddy making a show of messing with people for a laugh, and Ben and Louise, his desperate-not-to-seem-uptight American guests (respectively played by Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy), a little unsure about what to make of either him, his much younger wife (a deceptively layered turn from Aisling Franciosi), their mute son (Dan Hough) or, indeed, the idyllic-on-the-surface rural life Paddy has made for his family.

But as the peculiarities of this somewhat impulsive trip become more apparent, the film starts piling on the dread, teasing out a sinister twist that allows McAvoy to let rip with a performance of menacing unpredictability. He’s aided by Davis and McNairy, here playing a couple with a panicky child of their own (nicely played by Alix West Lefler) and simmering marital tensions that keep threatening to boil over.

McNairy’s meekness in particular stands in marked contrast to McAvoy’s bravado, recalling at times Dustin Hoffman’s emasculated protagonist in Straw Dogs - a comparison deliberately courted by the film’s West Country setting, but subverted too by McNairy’s realistically un-macho response to his family’s predicament and Davis’ mentally resilient matriarch, whose no-nonsense handling of the escalating horror is a bit more Ripley in Alien.

As the survival movie theatrics kick into high gear during the increasingly violent finale, the film unapologetically embraces its over-the-top genre elements. Yet McAvoy’s ability to play someone who can plausibly charm or harm from one second to the next gives it an edge all its own.

Beetlejuice | Warner Bros

“The afterlife is so random,” says a character in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The same might be said of Tim Burton’s belated sequel to 1988’s Beetlejuice, the surprise supernatural-themed hit that confirmed Burton as a commercially viable director (his next movie was Batman) and helped make stars of Michael Keaton and a then-16-year-old Winona Ryder. 

Both actors return for this long-in-the-works follow-up, which, like the first film, operates almost like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon for the Halloween set, replete with zany set-pieces, funhouse-style set design and 12A-suitable gore. Unlike the first film it also comes with a surfeit of unnecessary subplots designed to justify the revival of a 36-year-old movie that wasn’t exactly begging for a sequel. 

The convoluted story revolves around Ryder’s character, Lydia Deetz, who has grown up to become the successful host of a paranormal reality TV show. She’s also navigating a slew of family issues, mostly involving her estranged daughter Astrid (Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega), whom she pulls out of school to return to her hometown alongside her overbearing stepmother (Catherine O’Hara, reviving her role from the first film) and Lydia’s smarmy producer-turned-romantic-paramour (Justin Theroux) to attend the funeral of Lydia’s recently deceased father.

At which point you might start asking yourself: what about the main character whose misspelled name is repeated twice in the title? Keaton’s Beetleguese is, apparently, still pining for Lydia - and the imminent funeral of her father is just the opening his self-styled “bio-exorcist” needs to wile his way back into her life, something given more urgency by the fact that his mutilated soul-sucking ex-wife (Monica Bellucci) is stalking him in the afterlife, hungry for revenge.

As previously mentioned, it’s all pretty random and Burton might have been better excising a lot of the aforementioned family stuff in favour of the supernatural shenanigans of its main character. These, at least, provide us with Bellucci, whose entrance into the film - a deliciously over-the-top homage to classic monster movies - is the best things Burton has done in years. Keaton, too, slips back into his role with aplomb, recapturing the ribald stand-up persona of this “trickster demon” (as Lydia describes him) with a vigour that sends the film off the rails in some pleasingly anarchic ways. 

A playfully odious Ian McKellan is the only worthwhile thing about The Critic, a busily plotted backstage period drama about a hoity-toity London theatre critic (McKellan) who embarks on a ruinous Machiavellian plan to bring down his paper’s benevolent new owner (Mark Strong) for daring to curtail his acerbic review style.

Set against the backdrop of Oswald Mosely’s efforts to instigate a fascist uprising in 1930s Britain, the film twists itself like a pretzel, straining for topicality as it tries to work social commentary about class, homosexuality, colonialism and race into an already tonally challenged tale that veers from farce to satire to tragedy to murder-mystery in 95-odd minutes. Gemma Arterton co-stars as the insecure leading lady McKellan’s flamboyantly merciless journalist enlists in his nefarious plan. 

Speak No Evil is in cinemas from 12 September; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in cinemas now; The Critic is in cinemas from 13 September