I tried to see this movie as a double feature with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice but I messed up the times and the theater I was at, so I ended up having to see the first three quarters of this movie (finished it just now in my lunch hour and the last fifteen minutes are quite fun) and then all of Beetlejuice at like one in the morning. Richard Newby from the Hollywood Reporter in his year end review made the amazing observation that this movie’s trailer basically blanketed the airwaves for like four months of the year, proving to us that we could not escape from the horrors of Cotton-eyed Joe even in our dreams.
Speak No Evil has a pretty amazing absurdist streak that manifests itself in musical interludes. The Cotton-eyed Joe sequence of the trailer is actually eclipsed by a different song that makes itself an anthem for all time.
Mostly I think this movie is sort of a litmus test for parents and non-parents about how tolerant you would be of your child’s shenanigans around fixating on a specific stuffed animal. So much bloodshed would’ve been spared if these parents had just said fuck it and forced their child to cry all the way home to Heathrow. The major villains of this movie appear to be bad parenting, meat, and gravity. Two and a half babadooks.
