Best Keanu: “Oh noooooo!”

Best Keanu (honorable mention): “It was free pizza! Free fucking pizza!”

Oh, Evan. Pizza is never free.

There are many ways to view Knock Knock.

The first is that it’s just a bad movie, a kind of “what if Keanu Reeves decided to take a foray into softcore porn, and the director still couldn’t shoot a decent sex scene.” This is what I predicted my take would be, but it’s not a wholly bad movie, and I think the sex scene is deliberately bad. Because if it wasn’t, it would make the audience feel pretty nauseated for most of the film.

The second is that it’s an average thriller, with some truly scary moments, but with few elements that elevate it to an edge-of-your-seat piece of entertainment. The movie certainly acts as a warning that you really shouldn’t invite strangers into your home, even attractive young women soaking wet from the rain, especially when you’ve had some wine and weed and your family is away for the weekend.

The third is that Knock Knock is an artistic (to use the term loosely), surreal (to use the term precisely) depiction of the lasting trauma of child sexual abuse, especially against women.

I thought this was an overreach. I wasn’t prepared to give the makers of Knock Knock that much credit, but I’m settling on this take after reading the Wikipedia entry on Death Game, the 1977 film upon which Knock Knock is based.

The plot of Death Game seems to be nearly identical to that of Knock Knock. A family man is home alone for the weekend, two women show up at his door, he eventually invites them in, they have sex, they don’t leave, he threatens to call the authorities, they claim to be underage, they eventually trap him inside the house with violent behavior, they put him on trial for being a pedophile.

Little of this is watchable. Knock Knock is mostly upsetting and disturbing, save the first half-hour or so, when Evan and the women, Genesis and Bel, engage in conversation. These sequences were longer and more interesting than I anticipated. They seemed to reveal something fundamental about how vulnerable people are to making bad choices when their body chemistry is altered. The excuse, “hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time,” never had such a plausible exploration on film.

When the girls arrive in Knock Knock, Evan’s been drinking. It’s implied he had — or was about to — smoke something. It’s been a few weeks since he’s had sex with his wife, and she inexplicably left him hanging mid-coitus that very morning (they’re interrupted by the kids, who bring Father’s Day cake, and then she claims not to have time to finish when the kids leave).

The women “seduce” him through flattery, open talk of sex, and then plain old nakedness and mouth-on-cock. This is the if-Keanu-Reeves-did-softcore-porn portion, and it’s somewhat compelling, then laughable, then it gets dark.

When it turns dark, the women are clearly psychotic. You don’t expect the film to tell you why, but there are not-so-subtle hints. This is when the abuse theme makes itself known.

As a viewer, I wondered if this was me making the film deeper thematically than it actually was. But I will take this quote from the Wikipedia page on Death Game to back up my take:

“Literary critic John Kenneth Muir found an underlying feminist theme in Death Game stemming from its depiction of male infidelity and suggested immoral father-daughter relations. Muir explained that the film’s narrative consistently points to this motif, including the opening sequence featuring the song ‘Good Old Dad,’ the female leads constantly calling George ‘daddy,’ and Jackson admitting to being a victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of her father.”

If that’s an accurate explanation of Muir’s take, I agree with it.

I’ll also add that among the final sequences of Knock Knock is a camera tour through the vandalism the women have perpetrated on Evan’s family home. The extensive graffiti has a singular theme, and the acts the women commit against Evan reveal they have chosen to ruin him — and the other men they have victimized — in a very specific kind of way.

I also am in the mood for a nice feminist flip on this narrative. It wasn’t too long ago I watched Dangerous Liaisons for the first time — a film that, incredibly, despite its repulsive subject matter, was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 1988 and won three. It may seem like a weird comparison, but I want to give Knock Knock credit for saying, a little more than implicitly, look at what this actually is.

It’s also potentially triggering for people who’ve experienced abuse, so just as To The Bone is perhaps challenging viewing for those in recovery from eating disorders, abuse victims might want to take a hard pass on Knock Knock.

There’s also a supposed implication in Knock Knock that men — to be clear, adult men who are not pedophiles — are basically dumb when sex is involved. I’d say people of all genders fall into this category. We’re all dumb when sex is involved, and make stupid choices when our brain has enough illicit substance, if it’s late at night, the family’s away at the beach, we’re rich and have a huge nice home, and two attractive people show up at our door. Soaking wet.

My first star rating for Knock Knock was 2/5, before I found outside justification for my suspicion there was a deeper theme here. That’s when I bumped it up to 3.5/5. However, I’m not sure I recommend actually watching this movie. If you do, I think you’re justified to switch it off when Evan gets a notification that the womens’ Uber has finally arrived.

March 2022