The Tartan

By Eshaan Joshi

I had the unique pleasure of asking Mackenzie Davis about her experience working for the upcoming movie “Speak No Evil,” and all I got for it was this article.

Well, I gotta make the most of it, right?

Mackenzie Davis plays the role of Louise Dalton, the “this is not what it seems” wife, opposite Scoot McNairy as Ben Dalton, the “if we just go along with this, it’ll be okay” husband. Which are two totally useless descriptors if you have no idea what “Speak No Evil” is, but this movie came out like a few days before this gets published, and I saw it a few days before that.

“Speak No Evil” is a 2024 American remake of a Danish horror movie from 2022. While those two dates are VERY close together, it’s a reimagining of the plot, and a bringing of one of the more innovative horror stories of the decade to the American box office. The movie focuses on two couples, who meet by happenstance on a vacation and get along quite well. The other couple, played by the chilling James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi, invite the Daltons over to their estate, in Middle of Nowhere, England, for some R&R. Facing a strained marriage and stressful work, the Daltons decide: “What the hell.”

It’s at this point I can actually talk about Louise and Ben, because their relationship and emotional responses begin to take center stage right away. Ben quickly becomes the sort of pushover expected only out of the British upper class and greasy middle managers, and the actor quite brilliantly plays a man whose only goal is to just get by. He goes along with things, accepts strangeness as part of the cost of doing business, and ignores many of the red flags that would worry anyone who was paying attention. Or, y’know, anyone who ever watched “CSI.” Meanwhile, Louise begins to suspect something is wrong nearly immediately, and keeps pushing Ben to do something, anything about it, only to be rebuffed.

This creates an interesting dynamic, one that Davis expands on in the interview: “There are always dynamics in relationships that require one partner to acquiesce to the other […] in the past, it was much more equal, but there’s been a transgression, and in order to atone for it, my character is being more compliant and letting her husband take the lead.” This was perhaps the most interesting comment made during the interview, one where Davis talks about her view of the role. She claims it’s not that Louise would simply go along with whatever it was Ben wanted in most circumstances, but this is very much not in most circumstances. However, in this situation, Louise essentially ignores her own fears and worries because she believes that the best way to atone, to be forgiven for her mistake, is to simply let sleeping dogs lie and just let Ben have this win.

It also gives her relationship with Scoot a whole new meaning, as the two also starred opposite each other as Gordon Clarke and Cameron Howe in “Halt and Catch Fire.” She compared her relationship with Scoot as almost a father-daughter one, which made the expression of being a husband and wife couple just a bit awkward — she mentioned an intimate scene cut from the film for its strangeness, which does track with the movie’s apparent lack of intimacy between the Daltons. 

While Davis played the smart, and for purposes of the film, non-confrontational wife, her foils in the movie are the manic Franciosi and insane McAvoy, who manage to inspire nothing but terror in their performances. Louise’s initial skepticism of the couple is foreshadowing as the two become stranger and more violent during the film, and she gave great praise to McAvoy’s brilliant performance. 

Davis also mentioned not having seen the original Danish movie before acting in the film. In fact, as of the interview on Sept. 10, she hadn’t seen the original at all. She wanted her performance to be hers, and with significant directorial leeway given to the actors, she did an excellent job in doing that with “Speak No Evil.”