SUNDANCE 2015: Capone raps on the door of Eli Roth's KNOCK KNOCK!!!
Published at: Jan. 30, 2015, 9:23 a.m. CST by Capone
Hey everyone. Capone in Park City, Utah at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
While the world at large eagerly awaits the official release of director Eli Roth’s previous film, GREEN INFERNO, Roth went ahead and made another movie that presents an alternate take on the home invasion for. This time around, the invaders are invited in and initially embraced by their victim. In the case of KNOCK KNOCK, the victim is Evan Webber (Keanu Reeves), an architect, husband and father of two, who is alone in his vast, immaculately decorated (largely with his wife’s sculptures) home. His wife and kids have left for a little weekend vacation while he is preparing to work. Then, in the middle of a torrential rain storm comes a knock on the door.
Two beautiful, dripping wet co-eds (GREEN INFERNO star Lorenza Izzo as Genesis, and Ana de Armas as Bel) arrive looking for a party. They realized that the cab they were in dropped them at the wrong house, and simply want a working phone to call a new car to come get them. Webber invites them in, gives them towels and orders them a car. The girls seems to have mastered the fine art of pushing things just a little too far. They find excuses to strokes Evan’s arm, compliment his physique, and promote the idea of free and open expressions of physical pleasure. Even is able to fend them off for a time, but these young women are just too persuasive, and before long, the threesome of the century is happening.
Not surprisingly, the girls’ true nature is more front and center in the clear light of day. Evan wakes up to a semi-trashed house, and the girls seem less intent on pleasing their new conquest and more about fucking with him while vandalizing his home. He eventually hustles them out of his place, gives them a ride somewhere far away, and heads back home to work. After a few hours, he hears a noise and nothing is the same again.
If some parts of this sound remarkably like director Michael Haneke’s FUNNY GAMES (either version), you aren’t the only one who thinks so. The girls even dream up a maniacal gameshow to torture Evan with as its only contestant. KNOCK KNOCK isn’t strictly a horror film by conventional standards, but the two women combined certainly are a type of invading force into Evan’s life. One could make a case that the film also borrows from FATAL ATTRACTION, as a way of urging men not to simply use and throw away pretty young women just because you can. I don’t get a real sense that Roth and his co-writers Guillermo Amoedo and Nicolás López (GREEN INFERNO, AFTERSHOCK) were going for that interpretation, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
This is an entirely different manner of performance than we’ve seen from Reeves. He begins the film as the genuinely happy family man (it’s Father’s Day, so everyone is being extra nice to him) and he quickly devolves into a prisoner and victim in his own home, who can’t seem to catch a break while being tortured and toyed with by these women. He screams and struggles and pleads to be released from their clutches, and I can’t imagine too many other mainstream actors willing to place himself in the position Reeves does. He’s powerless to resist from their acts of violence and sex, to the point where rape becomes a real factor in this film, just not the kind you’re used to seeing on screen. That alone is a fairly powerful approach to this material.
There comes a point in the third act where KNOCK KNOCK and its victimizers simply run out of steam, and things become a waiting game to get to the end. I don’t think there are too many surprises about how the story ends, and when the girls subject Reeves to a mean-spirited game show setting, things go from inventive to just plain silly. The film is largely lacking in genuine tension or drama, but it doesn’t necessarily need that to function and succeed as a thriller.
As a pure acting exercise, Reeves, Izzo, and De Armas all deliver strong performances, and I especially liked the opening moments of seduction and avoidance dancing that the three do. It’s funny, it’s masterfully executed, and it’s often quite amusing—all three often the hallmarks of most of Roth’s work. In KNOCK KNOCK, the laughs and terror move along the same thin line, and you are often caught unprepared when one or both of the girls steps into more dangerous territory. It’s not entirely clear whether Roth and company meant this film to be a cautionary tale or just an adventure in various forms of misconduct, but I’m guessing he’s striving to give us both. And for the most part, he gets us most of the way there.
