On first watch, it’s hard to articulate why Speak No Evil, the 2022 Danish horror film, is so disturbing. When the credits rolled, my wife and I agreed that a rewatch felt impossible. We couldn’t again subject ourselves to the experience, though if pulsing fear, agitation, and anxiety are the goals of horror, it had simply done its job to startling success. 

But amid these feeling was a grief too cuttingly familiar to simply be the result of Speak No Evil’s protagonists meeting grim fates, a phenomenon not unusual in horror movies. I’ve heard others posit that their own reaction was amplified by the film’s depictions of infanticide. While this feels closer, children are never immune from the horrors of horror. If anything, they’re drawn to it, and the evil in these films is commonly drawn to them. 

So what makes Speak No Evil—this seemingly tame horror film, sparing with graphic depictions and jump scares—so uniquely agitating? 

The movie isolates within us a particular sanctity that we all live in fear of transgressing. And this is something I wouldn’t have been able to describe had it not been for the story I’m about to tell, the evil I am about to speak:

In September 2023, six months before we watched Speak No Evil, my wife and I put to sleep the only dog we ever owned together, my only ever pet. Through the inconsolable grief of those final moments, I remember saying these words: It hit us harder because we don’t have kids, and he was our first dog. He became our baby. That was our mistake, thinking of him as our baby.

My dog’s life over, it, like Speak No Evil, was so affecting, my initial response, which should have been gratitude, was overwhelming regret.

*

My wife and I are both from Phoenix, Arizona. On a winter holiday, where we each stayed with our respective parents, she called to tell me her mom had taken in a stray chihuahua. She saw him wandering downtown for weeks, and each time she tried to coax him, he would growl; each time she touched him, he would nip; each time she approached, he would run. Finally, with the offering of food, she and her husband managed to corral him.

My wife and this dog, temporarily named Zippy, bonded during the course of that trip. However, he was slow to warm up to her. She began to notice he was anti-social, aggressive toward other animals and humans. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of how hard he was to love, she couldn’t help but be touched when he finally warmed up to her.

She wanted me to meet him. I picked her up on the evening of New Year’s Eve and waited while she brought Zippy out to relieve himself. I saw nothing of the temperamental animal he would reveal himself to be. For all the stories of him biting and growling and avoiding contact, he calmly walked over and rose onto his hind legs so I could pet him.

Later, I would joke that he knew what he was doing. Sneaking into my good graces meant he would have a home for the rest of his life, that this carefree kid would, for the next decade, learn to love him, a process tied to the decade during which he began to feel adult emotions, all weaving so tightly through his feelings for this creature that losing him would feel like the loss of so much more than a pet. 

*

The first thirty minutes of Speak No Evil is through the perspective of Bjorn, a Danish man with a wife, Louise, and a daughter, Agnes. They’re on vacation in Italy, at a resort with communal dinners and evening entertainment. But Bjorn harbors a sadness we see on his face when he thinks no one’s watching. It seems an uncomfortable truth has dawned on him: His vacation is as unsatisfactory as his life.

The choice to begin the film on vacation is notable. We embark under the notion that to alter our environments, our routines, our orbit of things and people, will bring to life parts of our selves that have gone dormant through routine. But all Bjorn seems to be learning is that this feeling of subservience, this soul-deadening slog of taxes and work and taking his daughter to school has stifled some essential notion of himself. 

Why, even on vacation, can’t he let loose this stifled thing? Because no matter how drastically he has altered his environment, he remains among the thing most truly defining: his family. Only by escaping the conditions of father and husband would Bjorn be able to escape himself. But he loves his family, would never abandon them; hence, the feeling that he’s sinking, trapped into being the responsible, boring person his life requires.

Some of this is extrapolation from one particular scene. While Bjorn, Louise, and Agnes are exploring the winding streets of some Italian town, Agnes realizes she’s lost her stuffed bunny, Ninus. Bjorn leaves to track down the bunny, retracing their steps. He finds the toy resting on a rock wall overlooking the sea, and barely taking a moment to enjoy the spectacular view, he returns to his family. 

They are no longer alone. With them are the newly arrived Dutch family: Patrick, Karin, and their son Abel. Bjorn returns Ninus to his daughter, who quietly accepts her father’s performance of a duty they both take for granted. 

But Patrick, after assessing the situation, tells Bjorn he is a hero for doing what he did. When Bjorn laughs away the compliment, Patrick becomes more earnest, insisting this act was heroic.

Later, Patrick and Karin will invite our family to stay with them, citing the fun time they had together in Italy. It will be Bjorn, ultimately, who pushes them to accept. The reason will be this very moment, when Patrick offered Bjorn a new view on his own life, seeing him as he wanted to be seen: a hero, who’s boredom and ennui are the born sacrifices of a caring father and husband.

At the end of the film, Patrick and Karin go to another resort, where they will, presumably, prey on a new family of vacationers, begging the question: why do they target people on holiday? 

Because in a person’s normal life, they can credit their dissatisfaction to any number of things they feel missing—not enough money, too small a house, a communal lack, a matrimonial rut. However, on vacation, away from your life yet still bothered by the same discontent, there’s no escaping that your unhappiness is far more complex than a result of circumstance. 

In other words, it is not your life that is lacking. It’s you. 

*

I agreed to adopt Zippy that night when I was drunk (how many lifelong repercussions are birthed under such circumstances?) and woke up the next morning regretting the decision. We were due to fly out that evening, and by the time I was awake and checking my texts, my wife had secured the animal’s airline ticket, bought him supplies, and my little hesitations—but are we really ready for a dog?—were quickly outpaced by the mounting responsibility.

Getting him home was my first test. He would never be an easy flier. We would put him in his airline approved carrier bag, from which he never ceased trying to escape. Once, during a flight, we managed to get the carrier with him in it under the seat in front of us. He seemed remarkably calm, and it was the first time in hours we were able to relax. I watched out the airplane window, allowing myself to slip into a pocket of serenity.

Eventually, my gaze drifted to the aisle, where I saw a little dog shaking himself as if just having risen, and I remember thinking this dog resembled ours. Then I realized it was ours, and I stuttered something that alerted my wife, sitting in the middle seat, to leap to action, hurdling the older woman to her left to stop him from running up and down the aisle. 

I registered a trickle of laughter beneath the whir of the plane. I remember being awed by my wife’s ability to act so instantaneously, something not quite characteristic. She was not, I would later realize, herself in that moment—she was a parent, a dog-parent admittedly, taking the kind of action, making the kind of easy sacrifice I associate with parents, for whom their children’s well-being has completely overtaken the mild shames, avoidances, and discomforts that account for too much of my life.

I’m amazed at the new degree of attention that emerges from parents, the way they sacrifice ego for the sake of another. And I admired it in my wife, who leapt to action to make sure our boy was safe, while I remained in my seat, nursing an inner calm, a clear not-leaping to action that also surprised me. I remained, when called upon, myself. Nothing new emerged. I was unable to transcend the bounds of my embarrassment, unable to transcend ego.

As we flew home, my wife agreed to let me name him. At the time, I was reading Ulysses, and something in the dog’s eyes, his temperament, his self-centeredness, reminded me of its protagonist. 

Bloom was mostly calm, though capable of shameless acting out. I was also mostly calm, but desperate to save face. For years, we would butt heads. How many old ladies, children, and, worst of all, pretty women, had he chased away by trying to attack their docile dogs, who watched on, astounded by this poor representative of their species? 

I saw a similar indictment when their eyes turned to me. I was often embarrassed by Bloom, embarrassed to be his owner. But I sensed my embarrassment was a sign of what I was lacking, that I, more than the other way around, was letting him down.

*

Social compliance is a major theme of the film. When our family first encounters Patrick, they are laying out by the pool. Patrick asks Bjorn if the recliner next to him, on which he has rested his and his daughter’s belongings, is occupied. Bjorn moves his things aside, bending to Patrick’s will, perhaps feeling confrontational avoidance in every fiber of his body.

Later, when Bjorn and Louise arrive at Patrick and Karin’s place, they gush, voices reaching that grating pitch of enthusiasm I previously assumed uniquely American. While they walk through the home, which is a bit old and old-fashioned and more cramped than their own, they scream politeness while sharing their true feelings in shared glances and mumbled Danish. 

Karin shows Louise and Agnes where the little girl will sleep—in Abel’s room, on a small mattress on the floor. Their politeness doesn’t waver, but in response to Agnes’s disappointment, Louise says under her breath, “We’ll figure something out.” 

This assurance is echoed later that night, when Agness knocks on their door to sleep with her parents. As the girl crawls between them, Louise says, “You’re with mom and dad now. Nothing’s going to happen to you.” It sounds like something she’s said before, the incantation she whispered into her daughter’s ear since she was a baby, any time she fussed or awoke from a bad dream. Maybe it’s just that I can imagine every parent saying this to their children, the result of primal instinct. But Speak No Evil challenges this notion, that there is nothing you wouldn’t do to protect your kids.

The fact that Louise whispered her earlier assurance in Danish: “we’ll figure something out,” pits assuring her daughter and social compliance against each other, something that accounts for part of the film’s particular edge of uneasiness. 

The movie does what horror movies do: unsettle the protagonists in escalating acts of menace and danger. These involve mishaps and miscommunications, moments during which, under the guise of politeness, Patrick and Karin exert too much control, and which, also under the guise of politeness, Bjorn and Louise relinquish too much. For example, Patrick has roasted a wild boar for dinner. He insists that Louise, a self-proclaimed vegetarian, taste the most succulent cut. He holds a fork to her mouth, and rather than hold firm to conviction, she opens when Bjorn, in Danish, coaches her to just take a small bite.

*

We moved many places with Bloom—to Oregon, New York, Cincinnati, then Dallas. Cars upset him just as much as planes. He was impossible to transport without subjecting him to a stress which exacerbated my own. We’d tried sedatives and something called a thunder vest (for him, not me), but these didn’t stop his eyes from bugging out when he sensed we were moving.

Fireworks and thunderstorms also gave him anxiety. He would find the farthest corner, oftentimes the bathroom, where there are no windows, and he would tremble against it, panting so deeply it was a wonder he didn’t pass out. It wasn’t easy to see him like that. Still, when I hear the first roar of thunder or start of fireworks, I startle, worried Bloom needs me.

It became crucial to my wellbeing to take care of his. He offered many opportunities, because of all his fear and anxiety. Then his need reached another degree when he started to become sick. He was never a particularly healthy dog—had a heart murmur, a loose back joint that slipped on occasion, causing cries so sharp our neighbors once knocked to make sure we weren’t torturing him. But things steadily worsened. He was diagnosed with a digestive disease, one for which he was on a number of medications that, on many days, were difficult to feed him. No matter what we put his pills in, eventually he would realize they were in there and he would stop eating that food. I remember looking at him, saying, it’s for your own good. Please, eat them. And he would stonily refuse. 

Sometimes, he was a difficult dog. Sometimes, despite how heartening it was for me to care for him, I wondered if it was worth the effort. I wondered, wouldn’t it be easier, wouldn’t my life be better had I not made that drunken agreement to become a dog owner? 

Of course, I wouldn’t be a dog owner forever. And once I lost that part of my identity, it didn’t feel like a blessing, but a curse. 

*

The line between politeness and dangerous compliance is drawn in two key moments.

Patrick and Karin tell Bjorn and Louise they’re taking them out to dinner. Louise, assuming the children are coming too, excites her daughter about the prospect of going out. However, as they’re about to leave, a man shows up. Karin introduces him as Muhajid, the babysitter, who she explains is going to watch Agnes and Abel while the parents are out. Louise looks disturbed, in part because she has unwittingly lied to her daughter.

The first time I watched the film, I felt uncomfortable with the way it was drawing upon European Anti-Islamic fear to generate tension. When we see that a strange man (a sexist function that, I admit, I’m willing to accept) has showed up to watch the kids, we’re supposed to feel a prod of discomfort. However, that prod is supposed to become a stab when we realize he is a brown man from a culture not known for raising their men with maternal, caregiving instincts. 

On my next watch, however, I felt differently. Muhajid is later revealed to be a sinister figure. Maybe I’m injecting a bit too much American liberal sensibility, but were Muhajid white, it would be a bit easier for Louise to question Karin about his maleness and sudden appearance. His race actually sharpens Louise’s discomfort at her own discomfort.  She knows how it would look for a white lady to level unfounded accusations at a brown man.

This helps illuminate how the film is able to hit such a deep nerve of discomfort. Louise’s gut tells her this man should not watch her child, yet her sense of decency tells her not to question him. It is a direct battle between the primal instinct to protect one’s child and the equally primal instinct to ingratiate oneself socially. The good person in Louise will not harshly judge Muhajid for his race. But a good person would also not leave her child with someone unvetted, vouched for by a woman Louise already has suspicions about.

The second illuminating moment comes at dinner. The menu is in Dutch, and Patrick is comically unhelpful when Bjorn and Louise ask for translations. Patrick tells him he’ll order for the table, and when Louise reminds him she doesn’t eat meat, he challenges her, pointing out that she isn’t a vegetarian, since she eats fish, but a pescatarian. On top of that, if she’s refraining from meat for environmental reasons, isn’t she being hypocritical for the fact that what we’re doing to our oceans is also environmentally destructive? 

Even if we agree with Patrick (literally she is a pescatarian and not a vegetarian) we hate that he’s saying it. We, like Louise, shut down at the contention in his voice. Not only can we not argue ideologically, but we don’t have the desire, the tenacity to do it. Patrick is displaying the exact opposite behavior that has been so prominently performed by Louise and Bjorn: he’s being impolite.

If we know nothing of what will come to pass, we know these two couples have different codes of conduct. It places the viewer in the position of a child, witnessing a tense exchange that could, at any moment, boil over—the pot is already starting to gurgle. If we have so far related to Bjorn and Louise’s pushover-ness, their need to set others at ease, we now feel profoundly put upon and upset to witness another couple behaving and saying exactly what they want, without regard for our feelings, for our desire to live, like the fish Patrick advocates for, in calm, undisturbed waters.

*

Bloom required care to manage his digestive disease, as well as a subsequent condition called IMHA anemia, as well as a worsening of his heart murmur and the early symptoms of congenital heart disease. 

By now, I knew that were he let loose in an airplane aisle, I would leap an old woman to corral him. I was no longer in my early twenties, a decade defined by insecurity, but in my thirties and far more self-assured. Would Bloom squat to relieve himself for an unusually long time, I wouldn’t register any curious onlookers. Were he to bark at another dog, I wouldn’t apologize. He demanded extra care, so I learned to care more. He needed to be loved and forgiven, so I learned to do those things better too. 

One morning I woke up to see him near my side of the bed, walking unsteadily, without any sure direction or directness of purpose.

“Are you okay, boy? Are you hungry?” I asked. I think he heard my voice, but he didn’t turn to me. I picked him up and held him, and when I suspected he couldn’t see, I placed my hand next to his nose so there would be no mistaking whose arms he was in—You’re with mom and dad now. Nothing’s going to happen to you.

I set him down, tried to test his vision, his hearing, his understanding of my gentle commands. I didn’t know whether it was his body or me that was failing him. Considering the way dogs follow pitch, I wondered if the panic and sadness in my voice was obscuring my tonal message. 

At one point, as my wife and I were getting ready to take him to the vet, I walked into the living room to see Bloom standing in the middle of the floor. He appeared to be panicking, head darting searchingly from left to right. He stood alone, cut off from his senses and any instinct that he was not trapped in a prison of one. 

I went to him and placed my hand near his face, so he could smell me. It set him at ease, calmed him. And as painful as it was to feel, in that prior moment, that I had abandoned him to fear, it felt good to know my touch, my presence could help him. That it was still in my power to be his hero.

*

Being a hero means doing the right thing when it’s most difficult. But both morality and difficulty are ever-shifting planes, which means heroism is just as tricky to pin down.

A few more cringeworthy moments of discomfort occur between the restaurant, where Patrick and Karin dirty dance together while Bjorn and Louise watch uncomfortably on, and the return home (on the ride back Patrick refuses to turn the music down, blasting it against Louise’s cries). But the sequence that compels our family to pack up and leave occurs later that night.

Louise takes a shower before bed. As she’s doing so, Patrick enters the bathroom. He uses the toilet, brushes his teeth, and through it all we see the look of shock on Louise’s face. Even when she returns to her and Bjorn’s room, she appears profoundly discomfited. She crawls into bed, still damp, clutching her towel. She edges closer to her husband, perhaps to tell him what happened.

But she doesn’t, and it occurs to us she’s going through something more complicated than we imagined. Her nuzzling turns into caressing, then kissing, and pretty soon Louise and Bjorn are having sex. What is it about this horrible night that inspires arousal? It could be the recognition of their similarities, their shared sensibility and way of life, revealed to them in opposition to Patrick and Karin. But a far more interesting interpretation is that Bjorn and Louise are aroused by Patrick and Karin’s way of life, the way they are so unapologetically themselves, even when it goes against common decency and social decorum. It can be a strain to keep playing the role of the smiling, happy, conciliatory person you assume it’s in your best interest to be. Among these comparative brutes, Louise and Bjorn are invited to be their true selves. All the rules they live in obeyance of no longer matter, which can be scary and off-putting, though clearly freeing and sexy too.

From the other room, Agnes calls to them, saying she wants to sleep in their bed. However, they barely notice, and don’t stop. Nor do they stop when Bjorn sees Patrick’s face pressed near the glass window to their bedroom, watching them for a tense moment. This clears away any imbalance between what Louise and Bjorn might be experiencing. They are as entangled in their motives as they are in each other—both aroused by the strangeness of the situation, the estrangement they feel for their normal tightly buttoned selves.

They fuck, ignoring the calls from their daughter. They fuck, even as a strange man watches. They fuck, when they perhaps normally make love. (While Patrick and Karin were dirty dancing at the bar, Bjorn and Louise also were on the dance floor, though their movements and touches were painfully more tepid and uncertain, far more inhibited, which is the worst thing to be when dancing, as when having sex.) Now, they are the self-centered, carnally inspired brutes they have rankled against the whole film. And they are relieved to escape themselves, selves shaped around parenthood, around the demands and needs of their daughter.

Their indulgence, however, puts their daughter’s safety at risk. Louise goes to check on Agnes, who is as silent as the rest of the house. She checks in Abel’s room, but Agnes’s mattress is empty. After some consideration, she gently opens the door to Patrick and Karin’s room, first revealing Patrick’s bare ass, poking from under the covers, then Karin, then Agnes, sleeping in their bed.

It’s the final straw, and Louise gathers her family to pack up and drive off while the rest of the house is asleep. We are relieved to know our on-screen surrogates are doing what they should, leave, go home, save themselves. It seems nothing can stand in their way now. Their hosts are asleep, and by the time they realize they’re gone, it’ll be too late. 

Then Agnes claims she forgot Ninus, her stuffed rabbit. Louise helps her look for it, then tries to console her, explaining that Ninus lives with Abel now, and he’ll be happy there. But Agnes cries, and we see Bjorn’s eyes watching his daughter through the rearview mirror.

His life as a parent is thankless. He does his duty, and like any duty performed, he receives little recognition for it. Perhaps the first time he ever felt commended was when Patrick called him a hero. Now, presented with the opportunity to act heroically again, to be given a hero’s thanks by his daughter, whose tears he will dry, he turns the car around.

What Bjorn doesn’t understand is that his ethical barometer, which tells him right from wrong, has been upturned by his hosts’ behavior, and his complex reaction to it. He is operating on the same plane of morality and consequence as before, though the circumstances have drastically changed. He thinks he’s being a hero to his daughter, but he is putting her in harm’s way. He thinks he’s being selfless, but he’s being selfish, trying to inspire those same feelings of self-satisfaction he felt last time he retrieved Ninus. He thinks he’s saving his daughter from pain, but he’s sentencing her to far more than she should ever know in her now abbreviated life.

To further highlight this point, the moment Bjorn steps back into Patrick and Karin’s house, Agnes discovers Ninus on the car’s floor.

*

I had long considered the moment we would have to put Bloom down, and I always told my wife it was important to me that we help him avoid as much suffering as possible. In my head, this was a clear line; the demarcation between mild and excessive suffering would be obvious.

The vet put him through a number of vision and hearing tests involving cotton balls, snapping fingers, and flashlights to the pupils. Through it all, he was docile, a dog we normally had to muzzle before handing him off to the technicians. After the tests, the doctor concluded he was blind, and this brought on the tears I had been holding in all morning.

A year prior, I held Bloom in this same office during his anemia spell and had felt his body go limp in my arms as a wet stain spread across my pants. He’d had a syncopal episode, head slumped as it never was when he was awake. I felt his full, slack weight in my arms, a strangely intimate, consoling moment amid my fear. At the time, I didn’t cry, and that I was now meant, I thought, that I understood we were nearing the end.

Bloom, we realized, could only walk in circles. While this could have been a sign of vestibular ataxia, something older dogs sometimes got in episodes they recovered from, there were signs—based on his blink response—that the issue was more central, the result of a stroke or brain tumor. The diagnostic for this would have been an MRI, which would cost thousands of dollars and in the end only tell us one of two things: that this was nothing serious, in which case he would recover naturally; or it would tell us it was a stroke or tumor, neither of which were advisable to treat, considering his medical history and age.

The vet told us to give it a week. If Bloom improves, we would know this was an episode. If he didn’t, we would know it was time to intervene. He avoided speaking directly about euthanasia. Taking their lead, I didn’t directly state it either. But the whole time I suffered over the question of when to let him go peacefully, when to guarantee him escaping the most suffering. When would relinquishing my responsibility actually be a sign of strength, making me not his executioner, but his hero?

On the way home, we stopped at the grocery store and bought a pack of ground turkey. For years Bloom had been on a special, hydrolyzed protein diet, but he would no longer eat, so we had to do something to stimulate his appetite. My wife cooked it and put it in a small bowl that I would feed him in handfuls. He ate some, but with none of his former ravenousness. 

He mostly lay on the couch. For walks, we carried him outside and set him down so he could joylessly relieve himself. His coordination was off, so too his desperation to smell and mark the entire living world. After a few days he would develop a likely urinary tract infection, that would have him pissing in our apartment every ten minutes or so, accidents we thought were the result of his enfeebled mind. For three nights, I was barely able to sleep, so attuned to his every movement. He would wander our bedroom on shaky legs, and I would watch as he confusedly tried to isolate a spot and relieve himself, and I would run for towels and cleaning supplies that, soon, I knew to just leave by the bed.

He wouldn’t take his pills. We tried putting it in chunks of turkey, but if he allowed the turkey into his mouth, he would find the pill and spit it out. Our apartment was spotted in pee stains. He wasn’t getting better, could only sit on the couch, seeming not to even enjoy the extra attention. 

My heart was broken. My world felt broken. Everything I took for granted about Bloom, the owner’s instinct developed over years of wordless care, was gone. I didn’t know what he wanted, didn’t know how to appeal to him, make him comfortable, show him love. I was sad and frustrated. I hadn’t been sleeping, and since Bloom wasn’t improving, I figured I never would again until he died. 

So here is the unspeakable evil I harbored over those final days: maybe it was all too much, not for him, but for me. I would be relieved to lose him, to end the pain of his drawn-out death. My life would be mine again, as I had often wished throughout our decade together, even in good health. 

So only four days into our weeklong trial, I made another appointment with the vet.

*

Whatever blazing bravado compels Bjorn to return, it is quickly dimmed by Patrick and Karin. It would all be so much easier had they been angry, but instead, they are hurt, disappointed in themselves for failing their guests so badly. They cite the differences in their income as the reason they are unable to offer better sleeping accommodations. Of bringing Agnes into their bed, they cite the fact that she was screaming for her parents, who were ignoring her, and they felt bad for the girl. Bjorn and Louise are susceptible to all of this manipulation, preying upon their need to be good, to not see themselves as snobs or bad parents. 

Some of the more unsettling moments of the film come from Abel and his relationship with Patrick and Karin. From the moment we meet Abel, he is quiet, which Patrick attributes to a condition called congenital aglossia, where a person is born with either no tongue or a very small one. Despite his ailment, Patrick and Karin, rather than be more patient, caring and loving, are less. They’re often aggressive with him, forcefully moving him from a playground when Louise notes he’s in Agnes’s way and yelling at him at night, when he moans in vague agony. 

In one scene their aggression toward Abel boils over. Agnes has taught Abel a choreographed dance that they perform for their parents. Agnes, the older of the two, is far more advanced than Abel, who does his best to follow along, but is always a step or two behind. Patrick stops the music to scold him. Shortly after the dance resumes, he stops it again. Louise and Bjorn are uncomfortable. Agnes has also lost her enthusiasm, saying she no longer wants to dance. However, Bjorn convinces her, at Patrick’s insistence, to try one more time. When Patrick stops the music next, he throws a glass at the wall near Abel, who is now openly weeping. Finally, Bjorn stands to reprimand Patrick for his poor parenting, but his voice is shaky. The hero he imagined inside himself isn’t emerging the way he thought it would.

Louise storms out of the house. Bjorn follows to check on her, and she tells him she needs some time alone. The situation inside clearly disturbed her. But why? We can assume for the same reason it disturbed us: here is a sullen young boy, born with a disadvantage, trying to attempt something that has finally put a smile on his face. And here is his father, holding him to a standard that not only wipes away that smile, but shames the boy to tears. 

Behind Bjorn comes Agnes, checking to see if Mommy is okay. However, rather than hold her daughter close after witnessing Abel’s mistreatment, Louise snaps, telling Agnes to go away. To me, this illuminates the fact that what bothers Louise about Patrick’s treatment of Abel is not how foreign it is, but how familiar. How many crayon-drawn pictures and school recitals has she had to sit through, hearing automatic encouragement sound from her own mouth. Hearing herself praise in that overly excited voice we use with children must get grating, must make her wonder what has become of her true feelings. That Louise snaps at Agnes when we expect her to draw her near is notable for many reasons, primarily because it is damning.

Before bed, Bjorn tells Louise he’ll take Agnes to her flute lesson on Tuesday. How does that sound, Agnes? Daddy is taking you to your flute lesson on Tuesday. 

For all they have been through, this final moment of assumed safety between the three of them focuses on a return to their normal lives, a return to their normal, if dissatisfying, selves. Now that they have seen what it would look like to allow their most unspeakable desires to surface, it is suddenly a treat to all sleep in one bed, to consider future obligations and chores. 

I’ve long believed the best thing about vacation is returning to your life renewed. It’s clear Bjorn is starting to feel that too. However, there is something foreboding in the distance and distractedness of his wife and daughter, something which speaks to us, somehow, telling us what we wish to tell Bjorn. It’s too late.

*

Bloom’s vet wasn’t in, so we saw another who told us that based on what she was seeing, we were talking days not weeks. I was relieved by the certainty of this phrase. By that point, the verdict I feared was her telling us it could be months before we had a reliable prognosis.

We decided to have them come to our apartment, imagining Bloom would be most comfortable there. I don’t know that there’s any point to rehashing our return home, having signed the appropriate forms, nor the wait for the vet and technician to arrive. All I can say is that there’s no logic I can now apply to the situation where, if given the opportunity, I wouldn’t stop the proceedings, wouldn’t take back my decision to end Bloom’s life. I know I was right then and wrong now. But I also don’t know that, and it’s one of the few mysteries of life I haven’t yet learned to live with, to accommodate in my world view, in my conception of myself.

When they arrived, the technician walked us through the procedure. He must have offered us the ability to look away or not be in the room, which we declined. In response, he said, referring to our early Halloween decorations, I saw the horror stuff and figured you guys wouldn’t be squeamish. He couldn’t have been further from the truth.

*

That night, Bjorn wakes to the sound of television. He creeps through the house, eventually finding himself outside, approaching the shed. There he finds the improbable photographic evidence that reveals the film’s concealed secret (a tiresome cliché, but one that, in this case, effectively reveals a twist both surprising and well layered): Abel was once the child of another couple. In fact, according to the pictures, Patrick and Karin have been photographed with many couples and their child, who in the next picture becomes theirs. The plot is revealed; Patrick and Karin plan to steal Agnes, and this is further confirmed when Bjorn, returning to the house to retrieve his family, sees Abel’s dead body floating in the pool.

The situation gives Bjorn his chance to be the hero. He wakes his family and hurries them to the car, offering no explanation. They make it off the property and down the road. The whole time a terrified Bjorn checks the rearview mirror, rattled when he sees a car’s headlights. His fear spikes, and to escape the approaching car he jerks onto a dirt road, where their own car stalls out. 

Inexplicably, he leaves his family in order to approach a cabin in the distance where he believes he can call for help. To get there, he must wade through a watery ditch, climb a fence, all of which he does without any of the sure-footedness we expect from our onscreen heroes, only to find the house empty, with no available method of communication.

His quest to be the hero of his own life is over. When he returns to the car, his family is gone. Eventually, Patrick’s car pulls up, and Bjorn sees his family, ignorant of all he has discovered, in the backseat. Patrick tells him to do what he says and everything will be fine, to which Bjorn, shaking and crying now that he has realized how he has let his family down, begs him not to hurt them. But at this point, he is powerless to do anything but get in the car.

*

I was powerless too. I had let in my dog’s executioners, and I complied with their instructions because they told me it was for the best. I so badly wanted to believe them, to relinquish the messiness of Bloom’s life, and accept my own rebirth, from caregiver to man who once again lived only for himself. 

Before the procedure, Bloom became antsy, as he had been for days now whenever he needed to urinate. We set him on the floor to relieve himself in the living room, then we brought him to the couch, wrapped in towels. The technician reached for Bloom’s foot. Over the course of the past year, he had gotten much bloodwork, so he knew a stranger’s reach for his leg meant a prick. And in a single heartbreaking instant, he nipped at him and growled; for a single heartbreaking instant he was his old self, and I thought, he’s going to be fine. He’s still in there. He still desires life.

I was Bjorn, sitting in the front seat next to Patrick, while his wife and daughter wondered aloud when they’d be back home, harboring a dark secret about the fate they were all approaching. I was certain what we were doing was wrong, that we weren’t euthanizing our dog, we were killing him. And yet, something—better sense or weakness or cowardice—kept me silent as they inserted the line.

*

Eventually, the fact that something is wrong dawns on Louise and Agnes, both of whom start to panic. Patrick tells them to be quiet, as does Karin, as does even Bjorn, who knows protesting is futile.

They stop in a clearing and Patrick flashes his lights. Out of another car comes Muhajid, the enigmatic babysitter. Realizing he’s coming for Agnes, Louise holds her tighter, desperately, as if trying to assume her into her body. 

I petted Bloom, keeping my hand on his head and hoping it brought him comfort.

Muhajid reaches for Agnes; Karin tells Louise to let her go, that she will let her go. Bjorn is easily subdued by a few quick punches from Patrick. He reaches into the backseat. Muhajid has restrained Louise. Karin holds Agnes. Patrick, clutching a pair of scissors pries open Agnes’s mouth and reaches for her tongue.

The first injection, the veterinarian said, will put him to sleep. When she gave it, his body sagged, his eyes closed, and he was out. It was comforting to see him at peace, sleeping deeper than his illness had allowed all week. But still, I felt something was wrong, felt that I, like Bjorn and Louise, was being restrained, not by an outside force, but by some strangely easy reversal. Keep Bloom alive had now become put Bloom to death, and the force of my bisected desires swelled, filled me with something heavy that I suspected would never lift.

This second shot, she said, is the one that will… What word had she used? Not the euphemism put him to sleep, because that wouldn’t have distinguished it from the first. Had she said kill him? Stop his heart? Nor do I know what phrase is most appropriate. Were I hearing another tell this story, I would say you eased his suffering, laid him to rest. But having experienced it, I can’t shake the fact that I killed him, let him die at another’s hand, ordered it. 

I don’t know the word for what Peter and Karin do to Agnes. They pry her mouth open, grab her tongue, all the while her parents are screaming and squirming, so near their daughter yet unable to protect her. 

Patrick cuts off Agnes’s tongue. 

The vet gave Bloom the second shot, and his body slumped heavier.

Bjorn vomits. Louise screams as Muhajid takes Agnes away to his car. This moment in the film felt so unsettlingly familiar, the moment when the worst has happened, when the world has changed, and you, absurdly, are still here, though with such a piece missing it feels you will never again be complete. 

*

The car with Louise, Bjorn, Patrick and Karin—which harbors an absence more palpable than the presence of all four combined—continues on to the sand dunes. We were introduced to this place earlier, in a scene where Patrick and Bjorn have their most character-revealing conversation, one that helps the viewer underscore the difference between them.

Patrick, signaling to his chest, says, “Sometimes I have this thing right here. And it’s so powerful and wild. And I like it.”

We assume Bjorn will be put off or curious, asking Patrick what this wild thing is. However, he understands completely, also claiming that it exists inside him: “Normally, I just try to hold it down. Or keep it in chains. I don’t know why. Too many rules, I guess. It’s claustrophobic. Like I became this person I don’t want to be. Just some guy. Some normal guy who gets up in the morning, takes his daughter to school, plays squash once a week, has dinner with people I don’t even like. And I’m so tired of smiling all the time.”

Which brings us back to the beginning, Bjorn’s bored response to his own life. He wants to be a hero, to escape the person he has become: the steady, consistent, reliably compliant father and husband. He loves his daughter and wife, though part of him wishes to shed the life he has built around them. The routine of parenthood, the exhausting effort and vigilance, has gotten old. However, there is no going back to the freedom of yesterday. Bjorn and Louise, having lost their daughter, having lost, as they fantasized at various times throughout the film, their selves, are unable to survive, to even put up a fight. Patrick orders them to strip. They do, then wait for the stones to rain down. 

Bjorn never understood that living his conventional life to provide his daughter a safety and security that Abel (though obviously not their actual son) never got from Patrick and Karin, was the heroic trial he longed for. That was life presenting him the opportunity to prove himself. And he failed.

So while the title refers primarily to the many red flags Louise and Bjorn let slide over the course of the film, it also seems to refer to an unspeakable evil that exists within them. That evil is the thing they subdue, the wild and powerful (and selfish) thing Patrick allows to dictate his conduct, and that Bjorn keeps in chains.

Was it my own chained selfishness that led me to euthanize my dog? Or was it the final test of my loyalty, love, and compassion? I know the answer. But I’ll always wonder whether that answer is wrong.

In the days after Bloom’s passing, I longed so desperately to hold him again, to feel his weight in my arms. I found two photos that I printed and framed and keep on the desk at which I’m writing this. In both, he’s in my lap. In one he’s looking straight at me; in the other he’s fast asleep. I chose these photos because he was not a dog who let down his guard easily. For him to appear so comfortable, enough to sleep as peacefully as he appeared when sedated, he must have trusted me very much. Some days this fills me with pride, others with shame. Maybe, that I live in both realities is proof that Bloom was right to trust me in the first place.