A Danish couple (Morten Burian and Sidsel Siem Koch) meets a Dutch couple (Fedja van Huêt and Karina Smulders) on holiday in Italy. When their new friends invite them to stay at their cabin, the Danes accept out of politeness.

This Danish Horror flick is like if Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure, Triangle of Sadness) made a Saw film. Like Jigsaw, the Dutch couple believes humans have become too far removed from their survival instincts. But their M.O. is social torture, serving their vegetarian guests meat and walking in on them in the bathroom.

The joke is that the Danish Couple are too polite to object to their hosts’ behaviour; a knuckle-gnawingly relatable sentiment that sarcastically answers a question that has ruined many a horror movie: why don’t they just leave?

There are bigger political implications about the horrors liberals are prepared to permit, but the film wisely focuses on the smaller observations – from meeting someone who seemed so fun on holiday or a night out only to find them objectionable in the cold light of day, to holding one’s tongue around someone yelling at their child lest we commit the cardinal sin of judging their parenting style.

Christian Tafdrup captures those feelings of the characters so astutely that when it turns in an instant from middle-class satire to upper-tier violence, the outcome is truly frightening. In the end Speak No Evil is more sick joke than deep meaning, but it becomes impossible to look away – and the fact we know where the whole thing is heading makes us all the more complicit in the horror.

But this is no Funny Games-style lecture; Tafdrup is not telling us what to think, only how to feel. I.e. like we need a shower. With the bathroom door locked.