KNOCK, KNOCK

US/Chile, 2015, 99 minutes, Colour.
Keanu Reeves, Lorenza Izzo, Ana de Armas, Aaron Burns, Ignacia Allamand, Colleen Camp.
Directed by Eli Roth.

Knock, Knock is a rather ugly cinema experience – not entirely surprising from Eli Roth, a director noted for his sense of the macabre, from his Cabin Fever to his two Hostel films and The Green Inferno.

The film is a remake of a 1977 thriller, Deathly Game, with Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp, who are producers along with Keanu Reeves. Part of the finance comes from Chile where the film was made.

On the phrases associated with the Hostel films was ”torture porn”. This phrase was used to describe a number of films emphasising the visuals of physical torture – and this is the case in Knock, Knock.

It starts peaceably enough, the picture of very happy family, waking up on Father’s Day, love between husband and wife, the two children bringing in gifts before they go off to a holiday at the beach, the father having to stay behind to finish his architectural work. His wife is an artist and is about to have a show.

That night, two young girls arrived at the door, drenched, looking for an address and wanting to come in. Reluctant, Evan lets them in, offers them some hospitality, towels, robes, cup of tea, and a taxi to pick them up.

Then follows some graphic seduction sequences where the girls turn on Evan (Reeves) and he succumbs, after resistance, to a vivid sexual encounter. In the morning, the girls began to create mayhem in the house, making a mess in the kitchen for breakfast, then beginning to deface the artworks. When the shock disturbs, he orders them to get out and threatens the police, they tell him that they are under age, that he is a pervert, that he faces long jail sentences if he is found out.

The film become something of a cat and mouse pursuit, with the girls generally dominating, defacing the whole house, embarrassing Evan when kindly neighbour (Colleen Camp) comes to visit and offer a massage. They are again sexually provocative, interrogating him about his opinion of his behaviour with the underage girls. They take the wife’s agent who arrives to collect the artworks, causing him to fall and hit his head, dying. They tie Evan up, humiliating, stabbing him, ultimately taking him out into the grounds, getting him to dig a grave, burying him up to his neck, continually taunting him – revealing that they had listened in to his conversation with his wife, with the use of Facebook, have only been joking and that they are not underage at all.

While this part of the film is hard watching and often very distasteful, audience curiosity as to what happens when his wife and family find out continues to gain momentum.At the end of the film, they do arrive home, open the door, discover that the defaced artworks – and the final credits come up.

Which means that the audience has to imagine what the consequences for Evan and his wife will be. (And a blogger suggests that there should be a sequel where Evan pursues the girls to reach his revenge.)