Highlights
- Knock Knock, starring Keanu Reeves and Ana De Armas, is a panned home-invasion thriller with a chaotic story and lackluster performances.
- Audiences and critics alike largely dislike the film, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 19% from the general audience and 37% from critics.
- Despite the negative reception, Keanu Reeves enjoyed filming the movie and described a memorable moment in which his character pleads for his life.
There’s no shortage of popular stars in Hollywood, but two of the most universally loved have to be Keanu Reeves and Ana De Armas. Their status as universally loved performers may be the very thing that would lead some people to beg for a movie starring the two, but they’ve actually been in a movie together before. Back in 2015, the two starred in the home-invasion thriller movie Knock Knock.
Some might be surprised to have never heard of such a movie, but the fact that it is both panned by critics and general audiences alike is probably what has left the film back in 2015. With a chaotic and simple story, performances that don’t do anything incredible, and some odd twists, Knock Knock is the kind of movie that one has to experience in order to properly form their own opinion.
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What Is Knock Knock About?
Knock Knock | |
|---|---|
Director | Eli Roth |
Writers | Eli Roth, Guillermo Amoedo, Nicolás López |
Cast | Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas, Lorenza Izzo |
Release Dates | January 23, 2015 (Sundance) October 9, 2015 (United States) |
Runtime | 99 minutes |
Budget | $10 million |
Box Office | $6.3 million |
While Knock Knock is a home-invasion thriller, it is anything but typical. Rather than facing attacks from intruders trying to get in, this home-invasion story goes over what might happen if one were to willingly let in the wrong kinds of people. Married man Evan Webber is left alone at home for the weekend, expecting nothing more than an ordinary Father’s Day alone. His artist wife took their kids on a beach weekend, though Evan knows he’s going to be having some visitors to deal with one of his wife’s sculptures.
To Evan’s surprise, Genesis and Bel, two young women caught in the middle of a massive rainstorm come to his door. They say that they were out looking for a party, so Evan invites them in until they can figure out where they’re headed. Slowly, things get stranger and stranger until the girls have vanished, with Evan finding some of their clothes. He eventually finds the two women, who seduce him into a threesome, though that is where things get complicated. The girls begin to ravage Evan’s house, even defacing his wife’s sculpture, before telling Evan that both the girls are actually underage.
Knock Knock is available to buy or rent on Prime Video
The women terrorize Evan emotionally in some nightmarish ways, even forcing him into a variety of horrific situations through threats of calls to his family, causing Evan to finally try to fight back. The two girls are more than enough for Evan, resulting in him being tied to a chair as one of his wife’s colleagues arrives to pick up her sculpture. Just when it appears this man is going to help Evan, he winds up hitting his head and dying. To make matters more twisted, the girls frame Evan for the man’s death, ensuring that he’ll be punished long after they are gone. After another attempt at escape, Evan is held at gunpoint, and he learns that the two women intend to kill him at the dawn of the next day.
What Is Knock Knock’s Rotten Tomatoes Score?
Sadly, both fans and critics seem to mostly hate Knock Knock. On Rotten Tomatoes, the general audience has given the film a score of 19%, landing it solidly in rotten territory. The biggest complaint from the general audience seems to be that the story is rather lacking, even if the rest of the film looks pretty good. Acting as a remake of the 1970s film Death Game, many people who watched Knock Knock expecting something similar simply state that people should stick to the original. It’s also not a good thing when a thriller is said to have a flat ending that completely fizzles out.
Critics have given the film a slightly higher 37%, but many of the critics who don’t like the film share many of the opinions of the general audience, primarily that the film is rather boring. This is despite the critique that the opening of the film is both solid and deeply interesting, meaning that the driving plot that keeps the film going just wasn’t enough for many. Despite the critics not having so much fun with the film, it seems Keanu Reeves did. In an interview with Collider, Keanu describes how much fun the film was and how many memorable moments there were:
“Yeah, lots of them I guess. Coming to mind, the character that I play – Evan – in a particular moment, he thinks he’s going to die, that the girls are gonna kill him, and he basically pleads for his life kind of saying, “Why? Why? You did this to me!” It’s his kind of plea, his aria of self-defense. That moment was pretty ... we shot it once at the end of the night and I asked to shoot it again and then Eli [Roth] was cool enough to do that. But that aria was a lot of fun.”
How Does Knock Knock End?
With the dawn of the new day having arrived, it seems like Evan is in a hopeless situation. The women have him at their mercy, tied up and placed in a hole in the ground, leaving him unable to move. The women even go as far as telling Evan he will die before narrowly missing him with a large stone, but that’s when they reveal what’s really going on. The whole night was nothing but a game to the women. They lied about their age to Evan, being above the age of consent, and simply like to play that game with “happily” married men.
Evan is certainly glad that he isn’t going to be killed, but the women make matters much worse when they show him a sexual video they recorded, one that they uploaded to the internet. With their game finally done, the women leave Evan in his hole, left to think about the decisions he’s made. Knock Knock comes to a close with Evan’s wife and kids arriving at the house to find it in ruin, unaware of the horrors that Evan faced.