Eli Roth, earlier on in his career, had a reputation for possibly being the one who was going to revitalize the horror genre and turn the average movies that get put out on their head. His initial efforts, Cabin Fever and Hostel, were promising. Now, a movie taking place around a home invasion, abandoning all the extremes that his previous films have had, showed a lot of promise. Especially when you add in Keanu Reeves, whose career is on the upswing from John Wick, it sounds like the potential to be a really great horror flick. It’s a shame that it fails in most aspects.
The only redeeming aspect of the film is the psych profile of the two leading actresses. Though they are tame in their torture methods, their idea of seduce and destroy and all their weird neurotic tendencies that come along with it turn out to be the most entertaining aspect. Only, they arrive a bit too late into the movie. By then we have already been subjected to bad acting and dialogue, so when the action kicks in we’re already wondering about what we’re going to have for dinner.
The script pulls lots of turns and twists, but since everything else is underwhelming, there is no interest. Every time something happens, it is met with more shrugs than shocks. Add this on top of the obvious sexual exploitation of the two female stars, like the film was meant to be built just for the male gaze, and you have a viewing experience that is so underwhelming you wonder if this was some sort of logistical tax write-off.
Knock Knock is a film to have in the background while anything else is going on. It’s a step backwards for the career of almost everyone involved, and while it won’t be one of the year’s most disliked films, it runs the worse crime of being one of the most forgettable.
Ultimately, it could simply be avoided, and you could find better films by everyone involved and maybe you should. Knock Knock is a film that plays on the fear that anyone could knock on your door and ruin your life, but it gives an impression of being so underwhelming that it’s unlikely that people wouldn’t want to answer the door due to boredom about what would happen next.
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