![knock knock (2015) knock knock (2015)](https://media.distractify.com/brand-img/6pOuPVoiu/0x0/knock-knock-ending-explained-1605119329664.jpg)
It’s just waiting to be picked apart and cut down to YouTube memery. Knock Knock truly is Reeves’s Wicker Man (2006) or his Vampire’s Kiss. Actors Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo have an obvious blast playing Reeves’s seductors/tormentors, but even their over-the-top, childlike exuberance somehow can’t match the strangely inhuman way he quietly delivers his lines. There’s an obvious humor to his delivery of lines like, “WoI made a mistake,” and “I’m an architect, so I believe that things happen by your own design,” points directly back to how hacky & corny the script is on a fundamental level, to the point where the film plays more like sketch comedy than erotic thriller. In Knock Knock, he reaches Nic Cage levels of distracting performance, a one man camp spectacle that often feels as if he’s making fun of his own lines instead of trying to sell them. Keanu Reeves has a bewildering way of balancing between overacting & underacting, with no measured sense of middle ground, that plays so damn weird when he’s given enough space to chew scenery. One of the reasons it’s difficult to tell if the comedy was entirely intentional here is that it largely comes across in the performances. Knock Knock is much more of a nihilist comedy than a pointed satire of gender politics and the psyche of the modern American husband/father. Instead, all that shines through is a Daisies-esque dedication to pointless, childlike abandon (except without the political context or attention to visual craft). You could search for meaning or a sense of morality in their gleeful chaos, maybe something about the gender reversal of predatory sexuality or about how all men are liars & cheats under the surface, but the film feels far too deliberately empty-headed for any of those themes to register. They destroy his home, yip like wild dogs, tie him up, sexually assault him, and stab him with food utensils. Of course, as soon as he cheats his doom is sealed and the girls immediately switch from sexual fantasy to violent nightmare. He’s initially kind to the girls, but far from predatory things eventually get too steamy for him to resist, though, as the girls flirtatiously pressure him into cheating on his wife over the course of a night lifted straight out of a letter to Penthouse. Keanu Reeves plays a doting husband who’s alone for the weekend in his beautiful home when two young women knock on his door soaked & shivering in the rain.
![knock knock (2015) knock knock (2015)](https://film-book.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/keanu-reeves-lorenza-izzo-ana-de-armas-knock-knock-01-600x350.png)
Whereas those titles have a pointed central message (usually about cultural tourism & American entitlement) & a dedication to gut-wrenching gore, however, Knock Knock is much more deliberately ditzy.
![knock knock (2015) knock knock (2015)](https://dvdcover.com/wp-content/uploads/2016-03-13_56e56705a41ab_KnockKnock2015R1DVDCover-950x634.jpg)
I’m not sure that I have enough context to settle that question of Roth’s tonal intent on my own, but I can say that if Knock Knock was indeed meant to be a setup for a joke, the punchline was constantly amusing, making for a decent entry point into a career I’ve been too grossed out to approach for more than a decade now.Ī nasty exploitation thriller that resembles a direct-to-DVD knockoff of Funny Games, it’s tempting to view Knock Knock in the same light as more typifying Eli Roth ventures like Hostel or Green Inferno. Everything from Keanu Reeves’s strange line deliveries to the film’s cheap digital look to its winking title suggests that it’s supposed to play like a joke.
![knock knock (2015) knock knock (2015)](https://cloud.filmfed.com/movies/images/l_e574287e-dfb3-42d8-96e5-1b06c313b12e.jpg)
If you need a brief glimpse of what I’m getting at, look to the trailer for Roth’s recent home invasion piece Knock Knock. As sick as his sense of humor seems to be, I’ve come to think of Roth as something of a prankster. If you judge Roth solely by his fake Thanksgivingtrailer for the Grindhouse project, his performance as “The Bear Jew” in Inglourious Basterds, and his production work on the campy body horror Clown, he comes off as much less misanthropic than his usual reputation would suggest. Roth has a way of sneaking into other projects I’m interested in, though, and I’ve started to notice over the years that he seems to have a sense of humor to his work that I had missed out on from the outside looking in.
#KNOCK KNOCK (2015) MOVIE#
I’ve never bothered watching an Eli Roth movie before, mostly because I associate him with the mid 00s torture porn aesthetic that I generally try to avoid in my horror binges.