When your nice holiday friends later turn out to be more than terrible

You know that, just meeting really nice holiday friends? It can also be done differently. Those holiday friends may be very nice during your trip, but if you visit each other after that time… Hell. For that you have to go to the film Speak No Evil, with the Dutch couple Fedja van Huêt and Karina Smulders.

Is that a film about holiday friends that is completely made up? No, not that. Director Christian Tafdrup experienced something like this. The Dane admits that he sometimes makes a wrong assessment due to his penchant for politeness. That was certainly the case when he thought he made holiday friends with a couple from Rotterdam and later visited them. It’s fair to say that the final story of Speak No Evil is completely magnified. It is almost impossible to do otherwise, once you have seen the film.

Speak No Evil on Filmbox

Speak No Evil can be seen on Film 1. Tonight at 8:30 PM, the Danish psychological horror is also Film of the Week on FilmBox (in Ziggo’s basic package). All films on FilmBox are broadcast without commercial breaks. Metro already previewed it for the TV section Blik op de Buis.

Speak No Evil was already shown in the cinema last summer, but was then completely snowballed due to the crowds of Barbie and Oppenheimer. New chance then?

The holiday friends of Speak No Evil

During a holiday in Tuscany, a Danish and Dutch family become friends. In fact, they get along so well that they decide to visit each other again after the holidays. So Bjørn (Morten Burian), Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) and their daughter Agnes come to a house in the countryside in the south of the Netherlands. Their holiday friends Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders) and their disabled son Abel, who hardly speaks, live there. Fun fact: Van Huêt (Soof, De Condemnation) and Smulders (Emperor’s Wives, Nieuwe Buren) are husband and wife in real life. They have a daughter together.

As a viewer you immediately think: there is something to the Danish family. Mother Louise is a ‘no apple juice for my child, because it contains too much sugar’ type. And that head… The same goes for her husband. Is Bjørn a cheerful smiley face, or a grumpy one with a mock smile?

Holiday friends enjoying kale

Off to the Netherlands then, for the planned meeting with the holiday friends from that fun trip to Italy. It is nice that the Danes get to know the Netherlands through kale, Trijntje Oosterhuis and Herman Brood, among others.

When they are invited to go to a restaurant, we see the Dutch stinginess when the Danes have to pay for everything at the end of the evening (and are thanked very much for it). Patrick also drives the holiday friends home drunk. Has Metro miscalculated and do those Dutch people turn out to be very different from what they previously imagined?

And will that go from bad to worse? The answer is YES in all caps, brace yourself. It’s going to be terrible. Vacation friends? Never start. We’ll leave it at that…

Number of cans from 5: 3.5