Speak No Evil

The American family — Ben and Louise Dalton, with their eleven-year-old daughter Agnes — meet a magnetic British couple on holiday in Tuscany. Paddy is brash, charming, an alpha presence; Ciara is warm and slightly cowed; their young son Ant is mute. The Daltons' marriage is strained by Ben's recent professional failures and an old affair, and the easy intensity of their new friends is a welcome distraction. Months later, when an invitation arrives to spend a weekend at Paddy and Ciara's remote Devon farmhouse, they accept.

The visit unsettles immediately. Paddy is louder than they remember, sharper; he mocks Ben's weakness, presses Louise — a vegetarian — to eat goose, and oversteps repeatedly with Agnes. He pressures the Daltons into a drunken, suggestive late-night dance and seems to be testing how much they will tolerate before they speak up. Ciara apologises for him, again and again, but always as setup for one more push.

Paddy's treatment of Ant is brutal — slaps for small failures, food withheld, a tone of casual contempt — and the boy is desperate to communicate. He keeps slipping notes to Agnes. The Daltons try once to leave; Paddy weaponises guilt and Ciara breaks down, and they stay. Louise begins to find things in the house that do not match the family she met in Italy: photographs of other smiling families with Paddy and Ciara, IDs, jewellery, children who are not Ant.

They piece it together. Paddy and Ciara are serial predators. They befriend couples on holiday, lure them to the farmhouse, kill the parents, and keep the children. Ant is not their son — he is the boy from a previous family, and his tongue has been cut out. The Daltons are next.

The Daltons try to flee with both children. The farmhouse becomes the trap. A long, brutal home-defence fight follows — kitchen weapons, broken glass, hammers, blood. Ben, who has spent the film failing to stand his ground, finally fights Paddy room to room. Louise hunts Ciara through the house and ends her in a final, savage beat. Ben, bleeding and beaten, kills Paddy with sustained, deliberate violence — the only way any of them are leaving alive.

The Daltons escape with Agnes and with Ant. The film ends on the four of them on the road, leaving the farmhouse and what happened in it behind, the children silent in the back seat and the parents at last in possession of themselves.