For someone who played a super soldier in Terminator: Dark Fate and a replicant in Blade Runner 2049Mackenzie Davis was never more human than in the thriller Speak no evil.

Sure, she’s crouched in a bathroom hiding from a rampaging James McAvoy, but she’s wearing yellow rubber gloves while doing so. A handy addition for anyone who fears for their life.

“I didn’t want what I was using to get on my hands,” Davis says seriously over Zoom, while her Blue Heeler mix (“she has an Australian vibe”) barks in the background.

Speak no evil is a creeping psychological thriller that is also a pitch-black comedy of manners in which the fear of being rude to new friends trumps the fear of running for your life. Davis plays Louise Dalton, who is on holiday in Tuscany with her husband Ben (Scoot McNairy) and daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) when they meet McAvoy’s talkative Paddy, his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their son Ant (Dan Hough).

The Daltons, Americans living in London, initially think their new friends are a bit rude, but over time they get along well, and when Paddy asks them to visit him at his remote house in the west of England, they agree.

After their arrival, however, Louise and Ben become increasingly uncomfortable with their hosts’ behavior, so much so that their innocent question, “Is everything OK in there?” seems more like a threat than a social check. The real danger, as the Daltons see it, is social death.

“It feels more like social horror than conventional horror,” says Davis. “The horror of saying the wrong thing, of misunderstanding a situation in a way that could be perceived as extremely insensitive or politically incorrect or whatever. But how much energy is spent suppressing your own impulses, making sure you’re polite and nice and aware of the dynamics in a room, and sometimes that leads to you getting murdered.”

This isn’t a spoiler, folks; Davis is joking, which is typical of her very dry Canadian humor. During our 20-minute conversation, she is delightfully expressionless and decides that if she were in the same situation as Louise, she would run away. “I’m really good at lying,” she says. “If I didn’t want to be somewhere, I would lie 100 percent and leave very early.”

Since her first film Smash, In 2015, Davis built a solid foundation of work, from the cult TV series Stop and catch fire And Black Mirror to the science fiction blockbusters on the big screen Terminator: Dark Fate, Blade Runner 2049 And The Martian. Then came the incredibly prescient HBO hit of 2021 Station Elevenwhich imagined a world in which 99 percent of the population had died in a global pandemic.

In all of these works, Davis has demonstrated a left-leaning presence – in the best sense – sometimes edgy, sometimes strong, but never a step back. For a while she was labeled a “sci-fi girl,” but the 37-year-old never consciously chose to be one.

“No, I think it’s just a huge, weird coincidence that I did science fiction for a while, because those were just the roles that I got,” she says. “I mean, not only that, but they were really interesting directors or once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. I got to work with Ridley Scott – Blade Runner is my favorite film of all time – and I got to work on the sequel with Denis Villeneuve, who is one of my favorite directors of all time.

“And in Terminator is like, “Why shouldn’t you do it? You’ll never regret it. It’s so crazy to be a superhuman in the future. You should always take advantage of that opportunity.”

And that’s really the joy of acting. In what other world will you ever chase James McAvoy with an axe or pretend to talk to Matt Damon in space like they do in The Martian?

“It’s fun and silly sometimes,” she says. “But you spend a lot of hours sitting alone in a room wondering when you’re going to work — and that’s while you’re on set — but then you also get to do really crazy things where you wonder, ‘So when else should I be doing this particular thing?’ It’s cool to have that opportunity.”

In Speak no evilDavis is another left-leaning character. Her character is not your typical horror heroine and is therefore very relatable, especially when she recognizes warning signs and her husband keeps telling her to relax and she probably overreacts (which is not the case).

“I really know the feeling of having to take some shit sometimes,” Davis says. “I know I’m right and that a certain level of social grace is required, but I think to myself, ‘You’re going to regret the day you cross me.'”

Is this Canadian politeness?

“No, I don’t think that’s typical of Canada,” she says. “I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I don’t know, sometimes I feel like I have a little alarm bell in my head telling me how many things I can call out in a certain group of people on a given day. And of course that’s not every day or in every group of people, but sometimes, you know, at work or in other circumstances, you come across people who are constantly saying the most offensive things, and you think, ‘Oh God, I’ve already used up my counter of about 10 no’s today.’

“I felt a kind of soul mate with Louise, not because of everything about her, but certainly because of this basic feeling of wanting to have it simpler, wanting to be a simple person, wanting to belong to the group where everything just bounced off her, but instead it was quite a muscular effort that was clearly visible to everyone around her.”

The film is an English adaptation of a 2022 Danish film of the same name that became notorious after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. It was hailed as a “social satire with razor-sharp teeth”, with one person commenting that the real horror of the film was that a Danish couple would even visit the house of new friends (apparently a real Scandinavian no-no).

This English version, adapted and directed by British director James Watkins, deviates from the plot of the Danish film but still packs a bloody punch.

“I mean – full disclosure, I keep repeating this so it doesn’t sound like a talking point – but I think there’s something beautiful about thinking about remakes as experiments that are repeated with different themes,” says Davis. “In the original, there’s a Danish couple and a Dutch couple, and what’s being explored are those cultural dynamics.

“And if you look at it with this experimental metaphor, we simply swap the subjects, and you will get a different result with people who were raised and socialized in America and England than with the original subjects.

Load

“But I love the original ending. I like the darkest shit in the world and it’s so great what they did, but I also like what we did and I think both can exist and it can be fun to see how different people react in the same situation.”

Davis is currently shooting another Scandinavian adaptation, The pullin which she stars alongside Jamie Dornan (“My God. What an angel. I mean, I think he and James McAvoy are really good guys”), but she says she has no real career plan.

“I ask myself all the time, ‘Is there a plan?'” she says. “Does anyone have one? I think it’s just, ‘Does this person or this role or this story turn me on?’ And sometimes it’s all three, like the director or the actor or the story or the role, or all four, or sometimes it’s two, and that’s enough. And sometimes it’s all four, and that’s not enough.

“It’s like magic. How do you fall in love with someone? And sometimes you date someone just because they’re different from the last person you dated. And sometimes you date someone because you’ve had enough experience and you make really good choices. But sometimes you’re like, ‘Oh, I just want to ride on the back of a motorcycle.’ There are all kinds of weird reasons for doing things, and I don’t have a good one.”

Speak no evil will be in theaters on September 12th.