Knock Knock 2015 is more of a Lars Von Trier movie
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Before there was 2025 Balerina there were two other movies ( I know of ) which were collaborations of Keanu Reeves and Ana de Armas. One is the 2016 film Exposed which I am still yet to see. And then, before that, marking their first collaboration, there was a 2015 film by Eli Roth called Knock Knock, which I was curious to see for multiple reasons.
On the surface Knock Knock is a movie in a genre of a psychopath infiltrating a house and messing with the people in said house. But writer-director Eli Roth being an absolute deranged perverted Jew that he is, decided to sprinkle a lot of Lars Von Trier into that movie. Making it not satisfying, unless you are a masochist.
Being primarily a genre horror director ( which he is really good at ) Roth knows that the primary function of horror is to induce Norepineuphoria in the audience. Norepinephrine ( a form of Adrenalin ) is caused in 3 main ways: 1. With direct horror stuff. As in showing gore, or something scary. 2. With messing up with the heads of the audience, as in, making them question their own belief system with weird and sometimes outright insane ideas. ( This is what Lars Von Trier is very good at ) and 3. with sex.
During a period of arousal and then sexual climax, a large amount of norepinephrine is released into the brain, causing the very sensations that sex is causing. This is how you get sex-related psychological defense mechanisms ( like when a person is aroused by something terrible ). The brain is confused from the chemicals that are released, and decides to interpret the feeling as something positive. Giving birth a lot of perversions people have these days. On the other hand this is also how sexual trauma ( not related with physical abuse ) can occur. Again the brain gets conflicting signals from a burst of norepinephrine and interprets it as something very negative.
In any case, any good R rated horror film ( by somebody who knows this underlying psychological phenomenon ) will work pretty much in that order: First you get something really sexy, sometimes border-line pornographic. Think of Eli Roth's first half of his fucked up movie Hostel. He shows us so many naked women, and the plot is literally copy-pasted from a porn-film screenplay, that you naturally start to get the arousal norepinephrine. And then the movie shifts into the horror mode. All of a sudden it is survival, blood and limbs. Which attacks the same psychological stuff but from the other side, making a complete experience of being utterly fucked by the filmmakers.
With Knock Knock Roth was trying something a little different, which by the same math should have worked pretty much in the same way. Here he replaces the horror stuff in the second half of the movie, with the ideas stuff. He attacks the audience with so many conflicting thoughts about sex and relationships and stuff of that nature, to pretty much fuck up the audience in the same exact way a normal horror film will.
The first shot of the movie is Keanu Reeves having sex with Ignacia Allamand's character. And being Roth, their kids ( real life brother and sister Dan Baily and Megan Baily ) come into the room while they do that.
Then after some setup and exposition, we get to Keanu's character alone in the house and those two young girls ( Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo ) knock on his door, all wet from the rain. And Keanu being a nice guy lets them in. If you didn't already realized, those two girls are the psychopaths in the movie. And this is not even a spoiler, like the trailer of the film is literally centered around this very fact. And more than that, it is possibly working a little better when it comes to suspense if you actually know that those 2 bitches are not to be trusted.
In any case, in a proper Eli Roth way, the following stuff is pretty much taken out of a porn-film screenplay once again. They seduce both Reeves and the audience in the process. Almost to a point where you want Reeves to finally have sex with them. And after they do, the second half, of them being obnoxious and abusive to him, while also being DARPA all the way at him, begins.
The underlying psychological Norepineuphoria of the film comes from the obvious, yet brilliantly calculated mind-trap that Roth makes up. You have two girls that are super cute. So you are naturally on their side. But they are being abusive and fucking awful. And not just that, in a brilliant casting choice, they are being awful to Keanu fucking Reeves. This alone already causes some insane cognitive dissonance. But the movie goes further. The girls argue that he was the one that raped them. While you know from the earlier scene, that they seduced him. Which is a yet another layer of cognitive dissonance. But it doesn't stop there. It is a trap of sorts. You catch yourself as an audience member agreeing with an argument of what could be a rapist trying to protect himself. So you are starting to question yourself now. Are we treating rapists badly? Or to treat rapists appropriately we should also allow for this kind of abuse, as the one we see right now on screen? And then Roth introduces an ageist idea into the script, which pretty much guarantees people to have Norepineuphoria. And all this soup of intense cognitive dissonance is the meat of the horror.
There is no violence per se in the film. There is one death. But it is not gory. And there is like one stab wound. But there is so much of this psychological attack, that you pretty much hope already that it will end in a bloodshed. And yet Roth refuses it.
There is a filmmaker who does this very kind of movie almost all the time and his name is Lars Von Trier. I do believe Eli Roth's experiment here, while working, would work better if the writer-director was in fact Von Trier. I'm imagining what kind of movie would that be if that was Von Trier and I think a few things Von Trier would have done differently.
First of all, I think this movie would have worked better from the perspective of the girls. Or one of the girls. Because in a way, the seduction sequence of this movie, is very similar to a train scene in the first Nymphomaniac directed by Von Trier. Yet in that movie, he shows it from the perspective of one of the girls. Making us, perversely so, with her on her quest.
Then I think Von Trier would have introduced a more vulnerable main girl character. Perhaps the character of de Armas would have worked. Because we kind of see her being more sensitive, than the Izzo's character. And the movie would have been centered on her personal Norepineuphoria as she is helping Izzo's character to fuck up that guy.
As in the main drama of the film would have been her fighting her own guilt to pretend to be a psychopath, helping a real psychopath to psychologically mess up a guy who technically speaking has done nothing. Yet they are trying to make him believe that he has done something. And that's how their lie ( in the movie they lie about their ages to him, at one point, telling him that their are 15 ), would work so much better. As in then it is introducing an element of dramatic irony. We know they are lying. He doesn't know. And that leads him into his iconic monologue where he breaks apart in front of them. I think that would have been so much cooler.
This is an interesting movie when it comes to a very cold calculated script designed specifically to fuck up the audience. Some people might read political stuff in the film. I doubt Roth thought of anything of that kind. I think the only political thinking he did here, was how to use politics to fuck up the audience even harder. And I think in this regard he succeeded.
Roth knows how to use the camera. Especially to build tension. And the camera work in this film has some interesting artistic touches. The film is a bit obnoxious, but it is by design. What else can I say?
Happy Hacking!!!
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