Seven Writing Lessons in Seven Movie Minutes

What the opening scenes of Speak No Evil, the psychological thriller/social satire starring James McAvoy, can teach us about writing. Plus 100% McAvoy gifs.

One of my favorite 2024 movies, Speak No Evil, entered my awareness at just the right time.

If you haven’t seen it—or if, due to the forgettable title, you’ve confused it with other films—let me refresh you. On vacation in Tuscany, two couples—one British, one American—become fast friends. The fun-loving British couple follows up by inviting the angsty Americans to their rustic retreat in the UK countryside, where a series of minor transgressions escalate beyond social satire into dark horror.

If you’ve ever made friends with a couple while on vacation—or played nice with another family because your young child needs a playmate—this movie will make you squirm. I can skip movies about mask-wearing serial killers but give me a fraught dinner party or a disagreement with near strangers over parenting and I’m in!

When I first saw the Speak No Evil trailer, I was revising a suspense novel and questioning my choices about when to let the reader know enough about the bad guy to fear him. At this point, the reveal came after two hundred pages. Would it be better, I wondered, if the reader saw the signs well ahead of the main character—perhaps even close to the start?

Revising my novel, again—there’s still time to get it right!

After seeing a trailer that made the movie’s structure pretty clear—don’t you hate how much they give away?— I went to see Speak No Evil as soon as it released, specifically to test my storytelling preferences. How much did I want to know about a character’s evil intentions—and when? Which is more powerful: knowing more than the main characters, or about the same?

Here at Present Tense, we circle around this question regularly, and Caitlin and I both have a habit of using Hitchcock to explain. The great master had no interest in the mystery genre, which he considered intellectual and detached, with most information hidden from the reader until late in the story. His passion was suspense, which relies on the reader knowing more sooner, allowing tension to build.

Hitchcock explained the difference using the analogy of a bomb planted under a café table. If a couple is talking at the table and we listen to them chat, unaware of the bomb, the best we can get is a moment of surprise when the bomb explodes. If we’re aware of the bomb, we’re on the edge of our seats for the entire time.

In early drafts of my novel, I had hidden the bomb. I threw in several other ticking devices—red herrings, in other words— to complicate things. Should I reveal the real bomb sooner? I thought so, but I needed a nudge—and that nudge came from watching Speak No Evil, consciously monitoring the moments I distrusted the McAvoy character and paying attention to how that discomfort sucked me into the plot.

“Afraid of me?” Yes, you. You handsome devil.

I’ve thought about the movie ever since, realizing it has not one but many lessons for writers of every genre.

I’ve already stated the first:

Withhold less, reveal more and sooner, so suspense can build.

Anyone who has taught or edited writers has noticed that most of us have a habit of withholding unnecessarily, to the point of confusing readers. This doesn’t mean you can’t withhold some secrets and twists. Heck no! If anything, those later secrets will pay off more because your reader is already grounded in some basics. She has to know enough to care and, in the case of suspense, to feel some serious dread. If you can give away lots and still have extra tricks up your sleeve, then you are the Master Plotter!

Craft a worthy antagonist.

Most of us spend lots of time on our protagonists and less time on our antagonists. If we come started out reading classic lit or attending MFA programs, we probably think that the MC himself is his own worst enemy, i.e. antagonist. And…yes, that’s often true. (It’s even true in Speak No Evil.) But we can have it both ways. We can create trouble from within and without. We don’t have to choose between an MC’s own self-limiting ideas or inner demons, i.e. internal conflicts, and the story’s external conflicts, from the forces of history to dangerous weather to bad guys intent on ensnaring weak prey.

The biggest mistakes I’ve seen in both published novels and my own work is creating a dastardly human antagonist but failing to develop him fully, and the worst thing by far—keeping him off-stage until near the end of the novel! One year, I analyzed fifty suspense and mystery novels (more on this here) and in the weakest examples, the antagonist was completely unknown to the reader until nearly the end of the story. The reader feels cheated. She didn’t have any chance to figure out the baddie!

In Speak No Evil, the antagonist, Paddy, commands attention from the first frame. Of course, it helps when you have an actor like McAvoy whose body language alone is capable of communicating threat, sensuality, and complexity. We don’t know what he’s up to or what’s motivating his antics—those reveals can wait!—but we know he is a charming master manipulator.

Find the right brushstrokes of character

In the first minutes of Speak No Evil, our vulnerable main characters, Americans Louise and Ben, plus their young stuffy-toting daughter Agnes, arrive at a Tuscan resort. We see them at a pool, where the mom refuses to join her daughter swimming until she has “warmed up.” Everyone is tense.

Along comes Paddy (McAvoy) with his own charming wife and silent young son. Watch each action beat to decide what it’s showing you about Paddy’s character. What do the other characters’ reactions reveal about their own vulnerabilities and flaws? What are your guesses about what might happen next?

• Paddy asks to take young Agnes’s lounge chair since she’s in the pool, barely waiting for an answer from the wishy-washy dad, Ben.

• Paddy sips from a beer, though it’s early in the day (“Should we order a beer?” Ben wonders, seeing the other dad enjoying his, but Louise resists and he doesn’t follow his own urge). Without delay, Paddy cannonballs into the pool. No question who is the fun dad here!

• When Louise and Ben walk past Paddy’s hotel window, they see Paddy dancing with his wife, Ciara, in her undies. These folks are more hot-blooded than our uptight American couple.

• In town, Agnes, who is 11, loses her bunny, which sends her into a near panic. (The bunny is a source of marital tension; shouldn’t a pre-teen be past the stuffy stage?) Paddy and family appear. Paddy offers little Agnes a ride on his rented motor scooter—clearly dangerous; no helmet. Louise and Ben, stammering, don’t speak up soon enough and off they go. (Paddy also finds the bunny, but that’s less important than the risky and fun scooter ride.)

We’re only seven minutes into the movie! We haven’t gotten to the minor incident where Paddy charms Ben and Louise by being rude and gross to another foreign couple, in a way that shows the Americans habit of “just going along.”

By the way, we still don’t know much about Paddy in the conventional sense—for example, that he’s a Medecins Sans Frontieres doctor, mostly retired. As a writer, I might have mentioned that as soon as the couples met, and that would have been a mistake. Characters are defined by how they behave, not where they work. Ahem. Or don’t work.

What we do know is that he is the life of the party, fast-moving, sensual, and unconcerned about conventions like helmet safety and the no-cocktail-before-five rule.

The filmmaker used five or six brushstrokes to draw a portrait in under seven minutes, but even if he’d only used two—the show-offy canonball into the pool and the insistence on giving Agnes an iffy scooter ride—we’d be wondering if we need to worry about Ben and Louise.

Let the main characters cause their own downfalls

We also know, within those first seven minutes, that Ben and Louise are the real problem. They can’t make decisions. They’re not on the same page when it comes to parenting, jobs, sex, and much more. Most of all, they can’t speak up for themselves.

Everything that will happen next is the result of Ben and Louise’s unwillingness to know what they want and to draw appropriate boundaries. The movie works as social commentary about the danger of being overly polite and the temptation to ignore red flags when calling them out would cause embarrassment. But on the story level, it works because the American characters invite trouble. It doesn’t just fall out of the sky; it emerges from their flaws. Even if Paddy had never come along, Ben and Louise still might not last long as a couple, the viewer is guessing.

Don’t hurry the backstory

How often have you tried to shove in a bunch of backstory before the main story has gotten fully underway? We all do it!

The movie shows us Ben and Louise’s tension, but we don’t realize the specifics of their marital problems until well into the movie. When we get a little more info, it helps, but we didn’t need it as much as we needed to observe them in action, responding to everyday situations. Stay in the moment and show don’t tell. Yep.

If your story includes children, give them intelligence and agency

If you do happen to watch the original Danish-Dutch movie on which this movie is based, you will see lots of missed opportunities. The characters are not defined as quickly, precisely, or cleverly; the social trespasses aren’t as compellingly shown; twists are left out; the marital backstory is skipped over.

But you may notice, also, that the original story’s two children are weak characters. The little boy, especially, doesn’t show any agency or affect the plot. The children are victims who stand by as the adults get into trouble. In the remake, on the other hand, the child actors are phenomenal, playing more significant roles, solving mysteries, and doing their best to alert the dull-witted adults. Some would argue the little boy—Paddy’s son—is the hero of the remake.

You can’t please everyone

And speaking of original versus remake. Both movies received glowing reviews from professional critics. As for everyday viewers, they were divided, especially when it came to the original. Some thought the Danish-Dutch was far superior to the Hollywood version. Some thought the Danish-Dutch original was terrible.

I’m in the second camp. I couldn’t stop shouting “lost opportunity!” every time we got to a new scene without significant new revelations in character or a ratcheting-up of suspense. By the midpoint, I was frustrated with the main characters—and I was no longer believing in any of it. Other amateur reviewers say the same thing: No one would do what this couple is doing! Both films rely on passivity, but in the original, passivity strains credulity.

The origina'l’s ending, however, was the turd on the top of the sundae. Some reviewers loved it for its nihilistic shock value. (Hitchcock, I am fairly sure, would have classified the shock ending as an exploded bomb we didn’t see soon enough to care.)

For me, the ending was beyond ludicrous. I didn’t care about the antagonist, and as far as the characters I was supposed to be rooting for, I practically wanted to kill them myself.

How could an audience be so divided on such basic questions of credibility, character, and plotting?

How could one reviewer call the remake “diluted for mass appeal” while another reviewer said the remake’s “pacing is better, the characters are more robust, and the performances by James McAvoy and Mackenzie Davis make this a much better film”?

No wait—that’s the same reviewer! What?!! Which is it: “diluted” or a “much better film?” Ha! Good for you, reviewer man. Stand by that confusing opinion.

(Okay, okay, if you think the original was an allegory about the dangers of political correctness then you might think the remake is diluted. But I think the allegory failed for over a dozen reasons. This film professor explains the film’s many contrivances at length; worth a read if you’ve already seen the original and are brooding over it.)

At first, I planned to write this post after watching only the American remake. At the last minute, I decided to watch the Danish-Dutch original, which has only recently become easier to rent. I finished that viewing feeling frustrated. But then I realized that my frustration led to the lesson we writers need the most!

Not only can’t you please everyone. It’s your duty not to try. Don’t be an endless people pleaser! Funny enough, that’s the takeaway message for both Speak No Evil films, as well.

If everyone likes your work and no one loves it—and no one hates it, either—you might need to take more chances. Go bigger. Lean into the story you want to tell.

Let’s all say no thanks to those three star reviews. Let’s see some ones and fives!

Which of these lessons speak to your story struggles?

Did you love or hate either version of Speak No Evil?

Has another recent movie helped you ponder the craft of storytelling?

Let us know!

Andromeda Romano-Lax is the author of six novels, including her latest suspense novel, THE DEEPEST LAKE (Soho Crime, 2024). She is also a book coach and developmental editor who works with novelists and memoirists.