Speak No Evil (Danish: Gæsterne, lit. ’The Guests’) directed by Christian Tafdrup
The film centers on Bjørn and Louise, a Danish couple invited by Patrick and Karin, a Dutch couple, to their remote country house for a weekend, along with their respective children. It does not take long for the Danes to realise they have made a terrible mistake, though it is not until near the end that they (and we) fully understand their hosts are serial killers who prey on families, murdering the parents and abducting the children (after cutting out the abducted child’s tongue).
Towards the end, after Bjørn and Louise have been forced to undress and descend into a quarry pit, Bjørn finally asks Patrick why he is doing this. Patrick replies simply, ‘Because you let me’. It is a chilling moment, and held long enough for the viewer to reflect on its wider societal significance. They are then – like some biblical innocents – stoned to death in the pit.
What begins as politeness and a reluctance to confront increasingly troubling behaviour reveals itself as a catastrophic failure to act.
This recalls, by analogy, Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance: that a society unwilling to resist what undermines it may ultimately be destroyed by that very tolerance. One difficulty, of course, is that the first signs are often subtle and easily rationalised. What appears as virtue may instead be its distortion – politeness without courage, tolerance without judgement. This is why a systematic and coherent account of the virtues – such as the one offered by Aristotle – matters: only through cultivated dispositions such as courage and phronesis can one judge situations rightly and act before recognition comes too late.
The soundtrack, composed by Sune “Køter” Kølster, is persistently unsettling. The opening moments of the film are accompanied or rather deliberately overwhelmed by the score (recalling, in a more abrasive register, the way sound functions – if I remember accurately – at the beginning of The Shining).
The score also incorporates two stylised interpretations of Claudio Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa, whose emotional directness contrasts sharply with the film’s emotional repression, introducing brief but dissonant moments of human beauty and vulnerability.
The original can be heard in a performance by Helen Charlston and Toby Carr with The Gesualdo Six below.
(Speak No Evil)
