85
Thanks to a smart screenplay, excellent, stylish direction, and an outstanding cast from top to bottom, the entire production will unnerve and shake up all watching.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
91
The Playlist by Charles Barfield
Speak No Evil might not be a thrill-a-minute film, but it’s effective in a way that many horror movies just aren’t anymore. Watching it evokes the feeling of inching closer and closer to the end of a cliff; at any moment, you feel like you might still escape the situation until you eventually reach the point of no return.
83
The Film Stage by Christopher Schobert
Speak No Evil is riveting and upsetting in equal measure. And I never, ever want to see it again.
80
The director shoots and cuts almost every scene so that the most innocuous action seems charged with the expectation that something awful is about to erupt, cranking viewer tension to an unpleasant degree.
59
Those looking for bleak, slow horror and who are willing to suspend plenty of disbelief might want to check it out, but it won’t rock the worlds of the rest of us.
83
Entertainment Weekly by Leah Greenblatt
Pay no attention to the shades of late-night cable in the title; Speak No Evil is a lamentably generic name for a movie as stark and unsettling as Christian Tafdrup's queasy, inexorable thriller.
63
Until its contrived conclusion, the film plays as a queasy satire of conditioned interpersonal behavior.
100
Speak No Evil is the most cunningly depraved horror film in years, offering a piercing commentary on the ways we accommodate others to the point of self-subjugation.
80
It’s a profoundly uncomfortable piece of filmmaking, a meticulously judged exercise in satirical sadism. But a question mark over the third act climax leaves the audience with a sense of doubt: the ’what’ of the situation is genuinely disturbing, but the ’why’ is more elusive, a niggling inconsistency which undermines some of the picture’s considerable impact.