STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Architect Evan (Keanu Reeves) lives in a nice, swanky house with his wife Karen (Ignacia Allamand) and their two young boys. One weekend, Karen takes the boys away with her, leaving Evan on his own. He gets a surprise one night when two young women, Genesis (Lorenza Izzo) and Bell (Ana de Armas) knock on his door, claiming to have broken down and in need of a shower and a taxi. Initially pleasant, after luring Evan into a night of soaring passion, they then refuse to leave and subject him to a relentless, psychopathic barrage of violence and humiliation.
Playing like a variation on The Human Centipede set-up (and, by the end, astonishingly much more horrible than that film), despite not having much opening development between the main character and his loved ones, Knock Knock does manage to generate an interesting premise for the beginning. As soon as the girls arrive, knowing that things are going to take a sinister turn, it's intriguing to see just how this will play out and why. But after that, it just goes to pot and ends up leaving a really nasty taste in the mouth.
With elements of Phone Booth and Hard Candy chucked in to the plot, this skirts around the issue of young girls looking older than they are, and suckering older guys into going with them, an issue that's been playing in the media lately. But rather than using this as a plot device for some deep thought, it just degenerates into a relentlessly gratuitous and nasty piece of work, like a long winded, less grounded version of the superior British flick Cherry Tree Lane. Izzo and de Amis are a pair of seriously deranged, psychotic devil women, who just serve to distract from Reeves, who is as wooden as ever.
By the end, it's just started to become annoying and stupid, with only the theme from the end of Fight Club playing over the end credits to remind you of something better. You think of those two girls up the north of England who battered that woman to death in her house, and when you're expected to be entertained by something as dispiriting as this, it puts things in perspective. **
