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Speak No Evil Star Scoot McNairy Explains That Wild Ending Twist
"I feel like it is a hero's win, it's just in a different light that we haven't seen before.”
**SPOILER WARNING!! Spoilers below for the ending of Speak No Evil!!**
In this weekend's new Blumhouse film, Speak No Evil, the vacation that Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise (Mackenzie Davis) take doesn’t end the way they expected it would. Likewise, the new American adaptation of the 2022 Danish horror thriller of the same name doesn’t end in an expected way either. Both versions find a couple and their daughter heading to the countryside to visit another couple and their son after meeting on vacation and becoming friends. And both films find things escalating wildly from there.
In an interview with SYFY WIRE, McNairy and director James Watkins, explain the ending of the new film, how it differs from the Danish original, and what role “likability” plays in a horror movie like this.
Talking Speak No Evil's ending with star Scoot McNairy and director James Watkins
The Danish movie ends with the hosts succeeding in their plan to kill their guests (named Louise and Bjørn in the original), rob them, cut out their child’s tongue, and use their newly mute “daughter” to lure in their next victims. That’s not what happens in the American version, for reasons Watkins, who wrote the remake in addition to directing it, explained in depth here.
In this weekend's Speak No Evil, Ben, Louise, and their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) fight back against their hosts, Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi). Louise nails one of Paddy’s gun-toting friends in the skull with a hammer, sprays Paddy with acid, and shoves Ciara off a roof to her death. Agnes comes through in a clutch move when she injects Paddy with a sedative she’d snagged earlier. And Ant (Dan Hough), the son of Paddy’s previous victims whose tongue Agnes and Ciara cut off before forcing him to pretend to be their child, gets his revenge when he bludgeons Paddy to death with a guttural scream.
In the end though, Ben doesn’t exactly get a hero moment to the same extent. He breaks his ankle jumping off a roof to help them escape, and he’s instrumental in keeping his family alive, but he doesn’t finish anybody off, choosing not to kill the sedated Paddy (only for Ant to swoop in for the much-deserved coup de grâce). It’s fitting with his character throughout a lot of the movie, as Ben is somewhat meek and wishy-washy, getting into tiffs with his wife about how they’re raising their child and what to make of the red flags Paddy and Ciara are giving off. Time and time again, it’s Ben who doesn’t have the spine to stand up to Paddy, instead, he’s just going along with whatever’s polite as his family gets more and more imperiled.
At times, you wonder if the audience is supposed to even like this character.
“They’re not necessarily likable all the time,” Watkins tells SYFY WIRE about his protagonists. “They've got their problems and their issues and they're wrestling with them. But, you know, they don't deserve what occurs to them.”
Likewise, Watkins says he had to be “very deliberate” in calibrating the likability of Paddy and Ciara so that the audience would believe Ben and Louise would stay at all. “It’s what we called the red light, green light,” Watkins explains. “He does stuff that is dodgy, and then he does stuff that is charming and great, and it's constantly unsettling.”
McNairy says he wouldn’t go as far to call a character he played “unlikable,” but he understood the nuances.
“Ben's really, really insecure and incredibly vulnerable,” McNairy says. “I feel like that part of the movie was something that was a challenge for me because I felt like I really had to try and find strength within vulnerability and weakness.”
Through that lens, McNairy says Ben’s actions at the end of the film, where he doesn’t kill Paddy and let out a primal scream of the sort Paddy encouraged him to do earlier in the film, is a strength.
“For me, it felt as though Paddy wanted that. He wanted to bring the violence out of Ben to change him,” McNairy says. “Resisting what Patty wanted for him is where Ben found his strength within all of his broken marriage, his vulnerability, and his disconnect from his daughter. I feel like it is a hero's win. It's just in a different light that we haven't seen before.”
It’s a valid interpretation of the character, even if audiences don’t hoot and holler for it the same way they do when Louise or Ant unleash on their tormentors.
Speak No Evil is in theaters now. Get tickets at Fandango.
