When Danish director Christian Tafdrup was 12 years old, his parents made the mistake (they didn't know it would be one) of reconnecting with a German family they'd met while on vacation in Tuscany.
"They were not at all so friendly, not at all so funny, as they were in Italy," recalls the filmmaker. "In Italy, you're [enjoying] a beautiful starry night, and you eat good food, and you want to be the best versions of yourself. Suddenly, you're in this weird house outside Nuremberg in Germany, and you have to spend three days, and it's a really long three days. Many years later, I had a situation with my own family in Italy where we met a Dutch couple, and when they invited us to go see them, I said to my girlfriend, 'Let's not do that.'"
These experiences inspired Tafdrup to write the just-released Speak No Evil, a horror film in which a Danish couple (Morten Burian, Sidsel Siem Koch) and their young daughter (Liva Forsberg) accept an invitation to visit acquaintances in Holland (Fedja van Huêt, Karina Smulders, Marius Damslev), who turn out to be not as they originally appeared.
"It's actually a very simple premise," says Tafdrup, who cowrote the film with his brother Mads. "Pretty quick, it turns out that this couple is kind of weird and stepping over their boundaries all the time. But the Danes don't want to be rude — they're a guest in somebody else's house, and they're not capable of leaving, even though their car is just outside. It leads to a very fatal consequence in the end."
While much of film resembles a comedy-drama of manners, the final 20 minutes descend to a truly dark and hellish place which we won't spoil, one that is likely to disturb many viewers. It's a potential that pleases Tafdrup greatly.
"I made an agreement with my brother [that] we want to do the most disturbing film in Danish film history," says the director. "Actors said no to castings because they thought the last 20 pages were just too much, and many people asked me to rewrite that. I tried to rewrite it with more hope in the end, and then it just became a bad American horror film. That's not the premise of this film. But it's disturbing in a way you're not expecting. It's not a horror film with a lot of jump scares or supernatural elements or blood or violence. I think it's more psychological and maybe more intimate because it deals with something we can all experience. I mean, I'm not afraid of ghosts, but I'm afraid of something that wants to do harm to my family."
The film's shoot was repeatedly interrupted for COVID-related reasons. Tafdrup compares his travails to those endured by Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now, which seems a reach.
"It was my Apocalypse Now," insists the director. "In a way, I thought that this is more crazy than Apocalypse Now because we had corona, so we had these crazy rules. It felt like a nightmare making a nightmare. I did not know if I could finish the film. We were stopped four or five times — it took a year to shoot it. The seasons changed, the kids grew up, some of the actors were afraid of traveling because of corona. But it turned out to be a better film, because I had these breaks. I had to rewrite stuff. I became more clever. So I think it turned out a better film, but I was exhausted afterwards."
Speak No Evil played at this year's Sundance festival and was released in Denmark last March. Tafdrup says his movie has been embraced by viewers in Holland, despite the film's disturbing take on Dutch hospitality.
"Actually, they love it," says the director. "The funny thing is, I was in South Korea, and they were in shock. They said, 'How can you make a film where you mock another country? If we tried to mock Malaysia or somewhere, we would get banned.'"
The key to Tafdrup's skirting such headaches? Details. "I was very precise in my description of Dutch nature," he says. "People can see the irony and the humor. So I didn't get any death threats from Dutch people yet. I think they're too nice to do that."
Still, he's being careful: "I should not stay with any Dutch people in their private homes, of course."
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