“Speak No Evil,” a horror film released September 9th, 2024, directed by James Watkins, leaves viewers tense and tortured. Centered around 2 families, the Dalton’s and Ciara and Paddy, “Speak No Evil” takes us on a journey of family dynamics, gender roles, heroes and heroines, all while keeping you on the edge of your seat.
For context, Paddy and Ciara met the Dalton’s on a vacation, and soon after invited them to their personal home. Paddy and Ciara have a child, a boy, that doesn’t speak, and the Dalton’s have a young girl around the same age as the boy. As the movie progresses, Paddy and Ciara’s actions get increasingly stranger. Soon enough, with the help of each other, the Dalton’s realize they’re in danger beyond what they could have ever anticipated.
Mackenzie Davis plays Louise Dalton, the main heroine in the movie. As me and a handful of other journalists joined a Zoom roundtable interview days before the movie hit theaters, I was thrilled to unpack what Davis’ character and the film meant to her.
Each student journalist asked Davis between 1-2 questions about herself, her work, and/or the film, “Speak No Evil.” One journalist asked Davis about the internal conflict her character carries while simultaneously balancing social graces that are expected of women. He begged the question, “How do you get inspired to get into character to play someone who is having an identity crisis?”
Davis’ intellectual, relatable response left me wanting to know more. She emphasized that her character was not having an identity crisis, but just being alive. “For women, there is this desire to be easy and cool a lot of the time and sometimes…you’re bearing the weight of society that sometimes doesn’t want you or isolates you, but you don’t want to complain about it all the time because then you’re kind of a kill-joy,” Davis said.
And Davis would be right. Societal expectations of women often walk the line between asking too much from them, or not enough. You’re too quiet, too loud. Too many opinions, not enough. “Speak No Evil” explores the idea of gender roles, female morality and subservience, and how that identity influences your actions, even in a horror movie, where many times that’s not the focus.
One journalist asked about how such gender roles, like female morality and subservience, tie into the “horror” aspect of the film.
“The film really does do quite funny investigations into gender performance especially with the men – beautiful shot of them screaming on a hillside…it’s quite a fun exploration of how gender impacts our social behavior,” Davis said. The scene she speaks of, one you have to see to really understand, represents men and the behavior expectations they’re implored to satisfy. And of course, what’s a horror movie without screaming?
You can tangibly tell through the interview with Davis, she takes pride in balancing the intricacies of filmmaking, acting, and being herself. One journalist asked, “What elements did you find most challenging about the character to portray?”
“I struggled at first with understanding why she was so silent because she seemed to have really good instincts…that was sort of a challenge to figure out how to justify that for myself…I’m sort of quite impulsive to a fault where I would just sort of act and go on my instincts,” Davis answered.
She also mentions taking inspiration from her mother, a “ferocious woman with a face that says everything.” Funnily enough, Davis’ facial expressions in the film often spoke more than lines could.
Davis goes on to tell us how she wanted her character to be more “layered and complicated” in a way that made sense to her, more than just a wife looking to her husband and fulfilling a gender role she did not want placed on her character.
When it was my turn to ask a question, I thought about diving deeper into Davis’ thought process and techniques as an actress. I asked, “When you initially read the script, what scene initially stuck out to you as being the most challenging or most exciting to film? And when you were filming, was it the same scene? And how did you bring that scene to life?”
The scene she described as “hard” and “stayed hard” was when she gave a speech to Paddy and Ciara – she questioned the goal of the scene and the fact that it “kind of comes out of nowhere.” And when I watched the film, I couldn’t help but think the same thing.
“Could it be this? Could it be this? James Watkins was great at humoring me with my difficulties with it…it felt like something I needed to obsess over,” Davis told me about the scene. But Davis made the scene exactly what it needed to be – emotive, challenging, perplexing, and tense.
When asked about horror movies, Davis answered, “The whole theater becomes one organism. In a horror movie, more than any other genre, you can have this big ecstatic reaction.”
For us journalists, interviewing with a passionate, thoughtful and talented actress like Mackenzie Davis was our trip to the theater – our questions intertwined with each other’s and the “big ecstatic reaction” we all waited for was Mackenize’s.
“Speak No Evil” was a powerful film, and Davis’ work ethic and techniques built a story around breaking barriers as an actress by making your own storyline, instincts, and intentions for the character. Her bold, truthful answers proved to us journalists that Davis’ pride for her work goes beyond the screen.