Knock Knock ***
Dir: Eli Roth. With:
Keanu Reeves, Lorenza Izzo, Ana de Armas, Ignacia Allemand. 99 mins. Cert: 18
Multiple producer
credits aside, Eli Roth has been lying low since the skilfully nasty Hostel initiated the torture-porn cycle
a decade ago. We might, at a pinch, see signs of a maturing in his comeback
film’s premise: here, female sexuality threatens not the snickering fratboys of
his earlier work, but a middle-aged man who could stand for any number of
ageing showbusiness roués. With calculated perversity, Roth and co-writers Guillermo
Amoedo and Nicolas Lopez attempt a crossbreed of Fatal Attraction and Funny
Games, staging a sustained assault on the idyllic Hollywood retreat
architect father-of-two Keanu Reeves shares with his loving artist wife.
With the latter
taking kids out of town for the Father’s Day weekend, Reeves’ Evan has been
left to play his old Kiss albums and retrieve the pot previously consigned to a
drawer in his mancave. Fleshier temptation presents itself when big-eyed, bodacious
party girls Genesis and Bel (Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas) turn up on his doorstep,
soaked through from a storm. We know Evan regards himself as a knight in
shining armour, so it’s hardly surprising that he invites them in. We might question
the move, though: first the dude’s pants come down, then his whole civilised veneer.
After a sinuous opening
tracking shot, we’re largely left in situ watching the girls playing Evan for a
fool: cooing upon discovering his DJ past, marvelling at his muscle tone. The
film’s a judicious tease: for much of the first half, we’re anticipating hot
three-way action, yet for once, Roth appears less interested in the big bang
than he is in the initial tremors, and their possible repercussions. “I like
building up the anticipation,” Reeves declares while unwrapping his presents, and
his director may now feel similarly inclined: the gorehound of yore here
reveals a new-found attention to script nuance and other varieties of kink.
Izzo and de Armas,
afforded greater screen time than Hostel’s
harpies, actually prove the film’s most valuable players, shuffling through multiple
wardrobe changes, each time re-entering as different kinds of little monsters.
Keanu, attempting more acting than the recent John Wick demanded, is less certain: he’s nicely courtly when shrugging
off the girls’ initial advances, and it’s amusing seeing his inner Theodore Logan
reawaken when the flirtation moves up (or down) a notch, but he gets hysterical
during the morning-after parenting job. (His final scenes recall his deathless
Jonathan Harker, which is entertainment of a kind.)
As a vision, Knock Knock remains pretty grim: the man’s
an easily-led dupe who gets what he deserves, the women shape-shifting
temptresses. Yet the infrastructure sustaining it – a clever deployment of tensions
specific to the Uber app (a mainstream first), one eerily positioned overhead
shot establishing the house’s isolation, the tantalising hints this could all
be a bad dream – stands as uncommonly sound. Roth remains among our brighter
shock merchants; possibly we love to hate his films as we hate to love those
of, say, Lars von Trier – because they draw us in as they do.
You may consider it a
blessing that the film can’t sustain the frowning moral conservatism of the
AIDS-era Fatal Attraction; instead,
we witness the director cackling – loudly, maybe reassuringly – as the girls
threaten to out Evan as a paedophile, and a punchline that sniggers at the way
our nightmares have shifted over recent decades from the private to the public
domain. Little here is going to challenge the opinion of Roth as a bratty provocateur,
but it’s still fun to experience a latter-day thriller pushing so many buttons
in broadly the right order: if Knock
Knock’s no more than a sick joke, it’s been very shrewdly constructed.
Knock Knock is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
.JPG)
