Speak No Evil ending: How is it different from the original version?

The dust has settled. The trailer for Speak No Evil has been played endlessly in theaters for months, but the film is finally out, and enough time have passed that we can talk about what happened during the final act.

This post is going to contain spoilers for both the 2024 version of Speak No Evil and the 2022 original. Both are shocking in their own right, and take unique approaches to an increasingly sinister premise, but it's worth comparing, especially given how acclaimed the original film is. Did the remake live up to the hype?

The original film had a bleak conclusion

So let's discuss what happens in the Danish version of the film first. A Danish family become friends with a Dutch family during a vacation. After some time passes, the former gets an invite to stay with the latter at their home. The longer they stay, however, the more they come to realize that something is wrong.

As it turns out, the Dutch couple are not a happy family, but a pair of deranged serial killers who kill parents and adopt the surviving children as their own. The killers initially present their son, Abel, as not being able to speak as the result of a birth defect, but its eventually discovered that his tongue had been cut out when his real parents were killed (prior to the events of the film).

The original Speak No Evil ends with the Dutch serial killers stoning the Danish couple to death and taking their surviving daughter on as their own child. The film ends with said daughter going with the Danish couple to greet their next victims. It's a deeply cynical conclusion, and one that the American remake decides to effectively sidestep in favor of more traditional thrills.

The American remake takes a safer route

In the Speak No Evil remake, the dour outcome is completely undone. Instead, the American family who has stepped into the role of the Danish family discover what the serial killer couple is up to and proceed to fight them off in the film's final act. They succeed. The family manages to kill both of the killers, and the the film ends with everyone making it out alive.

The remake has some exciting set pieces, and a memorable lead performance by James McAvoy as one of the serial killers, but there's so much lost in translation with this new, happier ending. Speak No Evil 2022 was such an impactful release because it played on the notion of manners, and being too polite to voice one's own discomfort in the face of confrontation.

The Danish family are ultimately undone by their own lack of assertiveness. In the American version, there is no punishment or allegory to be considered. Family gets put in danger, and family gets away a little bloodied. It's a flattening of the source material that you won't remember long after you see it.