Movie reviews for November: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice & Speak No Evil
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Veteran actor Michael Keaton has recently enjoyed a late-career renaissance. Last year saw him returning to his most famous role as the DC movie universe’s first big-screen Batman with major supporting roles in The Flash and the ultimately canceled Batgirl. Keaton’s contributions, unfortunately, were poorly served by the DC corporate machine, and represent a wasted opportunity to resurrect a long-standing fan favorite. If only they’d had the foresight to call director Tim Burton, whose uniquely ‘American Gothic’ imagination was responsible for giving Keaton the role in the first place.
As if to make amends, Keaton and Burton have finally reunited to revisit Keaton’s other iconic movie persona, the eponymous demonic bio-exorcist of Burton’s much-loved 1988 horror-comedy Beetlejuice. The sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, picks up the story of Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the troubled goth teenager of the first movie with the ability to see ghosts, as a widow in her early fifties with a troubled teen daughter of her own.
While taping an episode of her paranormal TV show Ghost House, Lydia begins seeing fleeting glimpses of Beetlejuice (whose name was spelled like the star Betelgeuse in the original movie, but now appears in the credits spelled ‘Beetlejuice’), the ghost who attempted to force her into marriage thirty-six years earlier. Following the sudden death of her father in a shark attack, Lydia returns to her hometown of Winter River for the funeral, where her sleazy, exploitative man-bunned producer Rory (Justin Theroux) pressures her into agreeing to marry him at midnight on Halloween. What could go wrong, one wonders?
Meanwhile, in the afterlife, Beetlejuice is still carrying a torch for Lydia and has been ‘manifesting’ himself around her in the hope that she will summon him by saying his name three times. To complicate matters, Betelgeuse is warned by deceased actor-turned-detective Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe) that Dolores (Beetlejuice’s deranged, soul-devouring ex-wife, who he married sometime in the fourteenth century while he was robbing the graves of plague victims) has managed to staple her dismembered corpse back together and is now rampaging her way back to Betelgeuse for vengeance, leaving a trail of soul-drained bodies in her wake.
To describe the plot of this movie as gleefully bonkers would be a gross understatement. While it does pay lip service to some semblance of a story, that’s not what we’re doing here, and we all know it. What you’re getting for your $10 is 100 minutes of Tim Burton breaking out his favorite toys and having a tremendous amount of fun playing with them. There is some emotional depth to be found in a subplot involving Lydia’s daughter Astrid (played by Wednesday star Jenna Ortega) and the friendship she strikes up with a mysterious teenage boy, but it’s almost drowned out by Burton’s raucous bombardment of quick-fire set pieces. Burton manages to reference everything from Italian expressionist cinema of the 1950s to the TV show Soul Train, all while infusing the lot with his unique talent for crafting belly-laughs from yet another Grand Guignol splatterfest.
There’s no question that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice lacks the shocking originality of its predecessor, but longtime fans of Tim Burton will find themselves more than satisfied. Winona Ryder delivers a delightful performance as the slightly broken Lydia, while the years have done nothing to diminish the demonic gusto of Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice. Nostalgic in an entertainingly twisted way, this movie is Vincent Price’s jet-black comfy slippers; it’s Victor Frankenstein’s mug of cocoa before bed. Great fun.
Speak No Evil
Speak No Evil opens with a scene which, if you’ve ever been on vacation in another country, you’ve probably lived through. It’s around day two of your week, and you’re looking for a table in the hotel restaurant for breakfast. Or maybe you’re going for the last sun-lounger beside the pool. Then, that couple saunters over to you. They introduce themselves, and, less than an hour later, you’ve exchanged emails, social media, and phone numbers, and you know their entire life history from birth until sixty-one minutes ago. For the rest of your vacation, without knowing quite how it happened, they’re just, well, there… at the bar, at your dinner table, on the excursion that you’re certain you booked a month ago. They’re a bit too friendly — enough to be a little uncomfortable, but not quite creepy. The last thing you say to each other before getting on the plane home is: “We must meet up sometime!” Of course, you never see them again.
Speak No Evil, an American remake of the 2022 Dutch-Danish movie of the same name, takes this as its jumping-off point: What if you did see them again? Ben and Louise Dalton (played by Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis) are a well-to-do American couple living in London, on vacation in Italy with their 11-year-old daughter Agnes, where they meet the overtly-charming, free-spirited, charismatic Paddy (James McAvoy), his young wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and their withdrawn, mute son Ant. Later, back home in London, the Daltons are struggling to overcome marital issues (caused by Ben’s joblessness and Louise’s dalliance with another man) when they receive an invitation from Paddy and Ciara to spend a week at their remote cottage in the West Country.
What follows is an almost unbearable hour of slowly ratcheting tension and suspense as the ostensibly hospitable Paddy and Ciara manipulate and gaslight Ben and Louise into doubting their own sense of danger. Almost from the moment they arrive, their hindbrains sound the alarm that something is very, very wrong, but Paddy’s infectious, invasive affability draws them back in just before they cut loose and run. Meanwhile, the troubled Ant manages to strike up a shaky friendship with Agnes and begins a desperate attempt to warn her of the impending danger.
While Speak No Evil is marketed principally as a horror movie, it’s more of a psychological thriller than anything else. Director James Watkins does a superb job of hiking the tension ever-tighter through a series of ‘red flag’ moments which force the audience to yell “RUN AWAY!” louder every time, but the masterfully-manipulative, abusive Paddy draws them back from the brink and toys with them until the very end, when the movie explodes into a violent conclusion which recalls Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs.
Performances are superb across the board, although special mentions are in order for James McAvoy’s perfectly-nuanced, deeply disturbing Paddy, and young newcomer Dan Hough, whose tragic portrayal of the mute, abused young boy Ant is both heartbreaking and uplifting in equal measure. Although this remake is stripped of the original’s desperately bleak dénouement, it loses none of its shock value in translation.