'Speak No Evil' Proves Thrillers Are So Back
#289: "Speak No Evil," "The Perfect Couple," "The Penguin," "Industry," "Slow Horses"
Edition 289:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: We’ve got yet another great thriller in theaters, continuing what has become a year full of them. But hey, this one has an absolutely JACKED James McAvoy. Then we’ll take a pitstop in TV land and recommend some recently released shows on a few different streamers. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” the director of Palm Springs teams with Ethan Coen for a zany comedy.
QUICK FOLLOWUP:
On Wednesday I wrote about my 7 Commandments for going to movie theaters, then on Thursday I see a story in Variety announcing a $2.2 billion investment into upgrading 21,000 screens across the country. New laser projection! Upgraded sound! Let’s go!
Then I keep scrolling down and see that some of the funds will go to “adding pickleball courts, ziplines, arcades, bowling alleys and more attractions to keep moviegoers busy at theater complexes, in addition to dining and cocktails.” Ummm…so your solution to getting people to go to more movies is to give them more reasons to NOT go to the movies?? You gotta be kidding me.
Speak No Evil
We’re on the doorstep of what in this newsletter we call “MovieSZN,” the avalanche of fall movies spilling out of the festivals in Toronto, Venice, Telluride or the rest with hopes of riding the wave all the way to the Oscars stage.
It’s exciting this year, because unlike the past two, the narrative of 2024 in movies has yet to solidify (Barbenheimer in 2023 and Top Gun: Maverick / Everything Everywhere All At Once in 2022 were tone-setters in the spring and summer).
I mean, sure, it’s all but certain that Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine will be the highest-grossing movies of the year, each of which come with some narrative baggage (the comeback of mighty Pixar and an MCU revival thanks to dick jokes), but it’s rare that these kinds of corporate scoreboarding leave a lasting legacy — for example, The Avengers was the biggest movie of 2012 by a mile and a huge moment for Disney/Marvel, but that movie year is far more remembered for The Dark Knight Rises and other big budget prestige like Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln, Les Misérables or Argo knocking them all out for Best Picture and capping Ben Affleck’s long return to Hollywood’s favorite boy status.
All of that is long preamble to get to my main point, which is that I have a working theory about the year in movies 2024:
Thrillers are back, baby.
This is a genre that used to crush in the 90s and early 2000s, when throwing a couple movie stars in with an exciting plot aimed at adults was bankable without a movie needed to be “about something.” Just thrills for thrills sake. Streaming killed the genre and others like it (broad comedies, rom-coms, westerns), but horror not only survived, it thrived. And now it seems like thrillers piggybacked on the horror trend to sneak back into the mainstream.
Of all the movies I’ve seen so far this year (again, pre-MovieSZN), and with the addition of this week’s big release, these horror-inflected thrillers will count for four of my top six movies I’ve seen in 2024. A Quiet Place: Day One, Alien: Romulus and Longlegs are the others, and you could also count this year’s Trap and Monkey Man, though I suppose you could quibble with the categorization of a few of those.
The reasons why Speak No Evil is good is like a chorus of all the compliments I gave to the movies above: baggage-free, surprising, original premise, willing to take risk.
But this movie has what those others don’t, and that’s James McAvoy. He might be the best actor in the world whenever a part requires someone to go really big and turn it up to 11 (apologies to previous belt holders Al Pacino and Denzel Washington). Think about Split, playing 12+ different roles and all of them were extreme.
This time it’s only one, an incredibly jacked, hyper-masculine bro’s bro who is the centerpiece of the movie even though the story is told through the eyes of Scoot McNairy’s beta male cuck and his liberal, easily offended wife played by Mackenzie Davis (a “Halt and Catch Fire” reunion! …for the four people who care). I promise I’m not being overly harsh, the movie is quick to draw those distinctions when our couple first meets him and his wife on a vacation in Italy. They hit it off, and their similarly aged children hit it off too, so next comes an invitation to McAvoy’s house in the English countryside, which you can imagine may not be the best offer to accept.
However, writer/director James Watkins waits so so long to make the super obvious and inevitable turn toward danger. For more than 80% of the movie’s runtime, it’s a study in social paradigms and parenting. McAvoy and his wife (played well by Aisling Franciosi, but it’s no coincidence this is the one non-name actor among the leads) are shameless and passionate, saying and doing whatever they want and commanding their child around.
Meanwhile, McNairy and Davis are doing the conscientious gentle-parenting thing, and each time there’s a concerning conflict between the two sides it can easily be explained away as a difference in opinion. Between the lines, there’s plenty of commentary to be mined from Americans vs Brits, city people vs. country folk, liberal vs. conservative.
Of course as a viewer, it’s that horror movie feeling of “don’t go through that door!” or “get the f out of that house!” constantly for about an hour and a half, and the tension is being ratcheted up without any release to the point where when the turn to action begins, it’s a massive relief.
In both distinct phases, Watkins nails this adaptation of a 2022 Danish movie that I’m told was far more fatalistic. This movie is chilling, but it’s also quite funny and extremely approachable. Led by McAvoy’s supernova performance, it really does do everything you could hope for in a thriller.
I’m here for the revival! Give me five more like it!
New TV To Watch This Fall
The Perfect Couple (Netflix): Not sure how much more use Nicole Kidman can get out of playing the same character in all of these whodunit mini-series (“Big Little Lies,” “Nine Perfect Strangers,” “The Undoing”), but here’s one more that begins with a mystery dead body. The cast is interesting enough for me to keep going (Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, Jack Reynor) and I’m already loving the rich-poor dynamic between the Nantucket mansion-dwellers and the blue collar detectives, but the pilot episode did give me pause that this show would be any sort of classic.
The Penguin (Max): Apparently no one at D.C. asked Marvel how the strategy of stretching their movie universes over to the small screen worked out for them, or why they aren’t doing it anymore. This show begins right were the 2022 The Batman leaves off, setting up Collin Farrell’s mob boss character as kind of a Tony Soprano for Gotham. What makes his version of The Penguin character compelling, aside from the great makeup and affectation, is that he’s kind of dumb and kind of a loser, nonetheless striving to be godfather. And the world first conceived by Matt Reeves’ movie maintains its dark, rainy, noir-ish aesthetic that I love. I’ll definitely be giving this one a few more episodes.
Industry S3 (Max): We’re only six episodes into this 10-episode third season, but this season is rivaling Shogun for best TV show of 2024 in my book. It’s a high-energy drama about the world of London high finance, with some that vanity appeal of “Succession” and (only slightly) less monstrous characters. It’s got star-making acting performances, amazing writing and really ambitious big picture storytelling decisions have taken this already excellent show to another level this time around.
Slow Horses S4 (AppleTV+): I keep telling myself I’m going to watch this show, because literally every single person I know who has seen it raves about it, particularly the third and fourth seasons. I can’t speak to it personally but also want to recommend for anyone who likes espionage thrillers a la James Bond.
Trailer Watch: Brothers
We’re really starting to get a glimpse of Ethan Coen’s true sensibilities now that we have two solo projects without his brother Joel — cooky and ridiculous. That’s coming from someone who loves the guy’s work more than just about anyone. He’s straining the limits of cache he’s accumulated from his legendary career. And I’m absolutely here for it.
This time his story got picked up by director Max Barbakow, whose last movie Palm Springs was one of the best of 2020, giving me hope that this one could turn out a little better than Coen’s Drive Away Dolls. Why else would Josh Brolin, Glen Close, Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei and Brendan Fraser all sign up? The range between this movie’s peak and its floor is massive, but I’m choosing to believe.