Movie Review: Speak No Evil (2024)

Genre: Suspense Horror  

Director: James Watkins  
Starring: James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy  
Running Time: 110 minutes  

Synopsis: While in Italy on vacation, American couple Louise and Ben (Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) and their daughter Agnes befriend British couple Paddy and Ciara (James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi) and their son Ant, who is unable to speak due to a tongue condition. Louise and Ben subsequently accept an invite to spend a weekend at Paddy's home in rural Devon. Louise finds Paddy's behaviour increasingly unsettling, but her concerns are dismissed by Ben, deepening a pre-existing rift between the couple. But when Louise senses Agnes may be in danger, her unease escalates to horror.

What Works Well: This remake of a Danish-Dutch film expertly builds tension through a patient but still ominous opening hour. Director James Watkins leverages an excellent James McAvoy performance to construct a milieu dripping with social awkwardness, where every action may have multiple explanations from friendly to hostile. Subtle gestures, throwaway comments, and quirky behaviours may just be the habits of exciting new friends raising a child with disabilities, or clues about dangerous strangers. The strained bond between Louise and Ben, and the insecurities harboured by their daughter Agnes, add to the spiderweb of emotional fractures. The time for panic, once it arrives, is well-earned.

What Does Not Work As Well: As is common for the genre, some contrived reasons are combined with suspect decision making to swerve past opportunities to escape the horror.

Key Quote:

Paddy: I know we can both be...

Ciara: ...a bit much.



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Movie Review: My Son (2021)

Genre: Missing Child Mystery Thriller

Director: Christian Carion

Starring: James McAvoy, Claire Foy, Tom Cullen

Running Time: 95 minutes

Synopsis: Frequent business traveler Edmond Murray (James McAvoy) rushes back to rural Scotland, where his seven year old son Ethan has been abducted from a riverfront campsite. Edmond reconnects with his ex-wife Joan (Claire Foy), who is raising Ethan with her new husband Frank (Tom Cullen). Inspector Roy (Gary Lewis) is in charge of the investigation, and Edmond quickly suspects Frank is hiding something. When Roy is unexpectedly yanked off the case, it's left up to the divorced couple to unravel the mystery behind their son's disappearance.

What Works Well: The fog-shrouded Scottish Highlands locations carry a rustic beauty and amplify the missing child mystery. The opening act sets a compelling context of an absentee father returning home to deal with an unfolding crisis.

What Does Not Work As Well: McAvoy was apparently not provided a script and instead asked to improvise his lines. The resulting dissonance degrades an already ragged narrative where multiple opportunities are nurtured then carelessly scattered in the wind. Frank's erratic behaviour, the investigation taken over by "London", and Edmond's work backstory are all discarded in favour of a third act consumed by a too-dark spook show with undefined villains.

Conclusion: Chilly moodiness is undone by undisciplined plotting.



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Movie Review: Atonement (2007)

A drama and romance with a wartime backdrop, Atonement is a sweeping story of love, jealousy, and the jarring impacts of impulsive behaviour.

In England of 1935, Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) is a precocious 13-year-old living with her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and their parents at a lavish country estate. An observant aspiring writer, Briony harbours a crush on the housekeeper's well-educated son Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), but he is more interested in pursuing a romance with Cecilia. 

During one wild night, businessman Paul Marshall (Benedict Cumberbatch) is invited to dinner as a potential suitor for Cecilia, while Briony entertains visiting cousins. An explicit love note, an illicit sexual liaison, missing kids, a rape, and a life-changing false accusation follow in quick succession. 

By 1940 Robbie is part of Britain's defeated army in France. He pines for his lost love as he makes his way to the Dunkirk beaches awaiting evacuation. Back in England, Cecilia and Briony join the war effort and live with the consequences of that fateful night.

The Ian McEwan novel is adapted into a lavish yet brash production. Director Joe Wright dazzles with a full toolkit featuring stunning cinematography, razor sharp sound editing, breathtaking sets, a sly Christopher Hampton screenplay, and one slinky green dress. The outcome is a combustible mix of lust, envy, and war, with a cascading series of unfortunate events lighting the fuse.

The highlights are many. Keira Knightley in that dress earns a spot in the Hollywood wardrobe hall of fame. The sex-in-the-library scene is a steamy chapter of overflowing - and interrupted - passion. Robbie's tour of the Dunkirk beach, filmed in one continuous take lasting 5.5 minutes, is a bleak canvass of a defeated army. And Briony's interaction with a wounded French soldier exemplifies the pain inflicted by her actions, but also prods her on the road to redemption.

At the personal character level, Atonement toys with the crucial moments when fate intervenes to forever alter trajectories. The dinner night at the Tallis estate is audacious for the sheer quantity and quality of unexpected events, twists and turns. By the time the police car pulls away, most of the dinner attendees have had their destinies changed. At the grander cosmic scale, Atonement exposes war's massive appetite to consume lives. Robbie's story is known, but that Dunkirk beach is filled with thousands of individual experiences leading to the same time and place. Back home the rich get richer, while the emotionally wounded Cecilia and Briony face their own domestic hell.

The film's style is a triumph of dynamic artistry, with superlative images and sound. Wright deploys the rhythmic clacks of Briony's typewriter to build up tension, complementing visuals rich with symmetry, flashbacks and rewinds that fill gaps or replay scenes from a different perspective.

The cast bring the characters to life with plenty of verve, Saoirse Ronan emerging as the one unavoidable source of coiled tension. Her eyes shine with quiet anger, seething frustration, and rapid scheming, but she also never betrays the innocence of a 13 year old suddenly knocked off her centre by several carnal shocks. Atonement boasts a sleek exterior, but smolders within.



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Movie Review: Split (2016)

A psychological suspense thriller, Split combines to good effect a disturbing story of dissociative identity disorder with a girls-in-captivity drama.

Teenage friends Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) and their blacksheep classmate Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) are abducted by Kevin (James McAvoy), a troubled man with 23 distinct personalities. The girls are held in the windowless basement of an unknown building, and are gradually introduced to Kevin's various identities, including the obsessive compulsive Dennis, the prim and proper Patricia, and the childlike Hedwig.

The girls try various tricks to escape, while in flashback Casey recalls her dark childhood experiences being taught to hunt deer by her father and uncle. Another of Kevin's personalities is the artist Barry, and he frequently visits psychologist Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley) apparently seeking help but unable to articulate his latest crisis. A bad situation threatens to get worse when Hedwig warns the captive teens that The Beast, a destructive 24th personality, is about to come forth.

Split splits its time telling three satisfying stories, as director and writer M. Night Shyamalan weaves together elements from the past and present. The abduction and captivity is the centrepiece, and although fairly traditional in premise and execution, the strained dynamics between the duo of Claire and Marcia and Casey's darker disposition introduce intriguing texture. Shyamalan makes excellent use of the subterranean maze where the girls are being held, a dank and forgotten basement filled with unlabeled doors and endless hallways lined with pipes.

With James McAvoy never less than intimidating in a career defining performance, the sequential emergence of Kevin's various personalities also maintains an edge, although only about five of the 23 are properly introduced

The second parallel story is Kevin (with Barry presenting) interacting with psychologist Karen. She has a deep understanding of what and who she is dealing with, and doggedly probes Kevin's dense psyche to try and understand why he is reaching out for help. Karen's quest is not made easier by the broader psychology community's general skepticism about the reality of DID.

And finally, and in some ways most absorbing, are the flashbacks to Casey's childhood. Here Shyamalan gradually builds to horrors awaiting a young girl, starting with an innocuous introduction to wildlife hunting as a core life skill and ending with lifelong trauma.

Shyamalan builds enough material towards a powerful final act, but decides to undo some of his own good work. The director with an insatiable penchant for twists decides to steer Split towards a different final dimension, and the climax is a relative disappointment compared to the build-up, the suspense and human psychology elements left in a crumpled heap in favour of a late-arriving novelty theme.

But before the splits widen to cracks, Split offers a provocatively multi-faceted experience.

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Movie Review: Atomic Blonde (2017)

A cold war spy actionfest, Atomic Blonde kicks butt until there are no more butts to kick.

The year is 1989, just as the Berlin Wall is tumbling down. The story is told in flashback, with MI6 field agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) being debriefed at the end of a raucous assignment, the CIA's Emmett Kurzfeld (John Goodman) among her interviewers. Lorraine was inserted into Berlin after the killing of agent James Gascoigne by the KGB's Yuri Bakhtin. She connect with station chief David Percival (James McAvoy), and they attempt to track down Stasi defector Spyglass (Eddie Marsan), who provided Gascoigne with a highly sensitive file revealing the names of all cold war spies, including the identity of a mysterious double agent known as Satchel.

Now Bakhtin has the file and is willing to sell it to the highest bidder. Lorraine finds Percival's methods eccentric, and also tangles with the KGB's Aleksander Bremovych and undercover French agent Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella). With hordes of rival goons and bloodthirsty spies all seeking the same prize, Loraine has to find Spyglass and keep him safe while fending off hordes of professional assassins at every turn.

Directed by David Leitch and adapted from a graphic novel, Atomic Blonde may be an attempt to kick-off a franchise revolving around super spy Lorraine Broughton. Stuck somewhere between celebrating and exploiting female empowerment, the film dissolves into endless repetition of violent episodes, whereby Lorraine tangles with and proceeds to eliminate several baddies in bone crunching close combat confrontations.

Once is fun, twice is ok, but by the time Leitch orchestrates the umpteenth one-against-many battles with pre-ordained outcomes (she survives to fight another day; the bad guys don't) in yet another empty building, any sense of tension, drama and build-up is comprehensively lost.

Clearly narrative momentum was an afterthought behind action and visual style. In amongst all the flying limbs and bullets finding their close-range targets, the plot struggles to emerge from hiding, perhaps worried about receiving a lethal kick to the side of the head. The "list of spies" that everyone is searching for is the most tired of McGuffins, and Leitch has little control over the crosses, double-crosses and triple-crosses fueling all the combat.

Atomic Blonde is bathed in cool blue and silver colours, the music is loud and filled with 1980s era pop and rock tracks as the film energetically hops between action set-pieces on either side of the crumbling wall. As an exercise in brain disengagement there is some enjoyment to be had, until duplication triumphs under the flag of exhaustion.

Theron does not so much act as glide through the film exuding cool with a singular expression of grim determination. She executes most of her stunts and looks great dishing out mayhem. James McAvoy as spy-gone-native Percival is more complex and potentially much more interesting, but Atomic Blonde has no time for character development. This spy world is an arcade game of kill or be killed every few minutes, and everything else is roadkill.

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