Knock Knock (2015) – Eli Roth
First, let me outline the story before I deconstruct the shot. Evan (Keanu Reeves) is unable to join his wife and two kids for a Father’s Day weekend trip as he is tied up with work. While working on a rainy night, Evan hears a series of strange noises which puts him on guard. He gets back to work but hears a knock on the door. He answers.
The first 5 seconds are brilliantly paced. The door slowly opens and bam, our two villains appear. When the camera does a reverse shot to Evan, he can’t believe his luck. So much of Roth’s work is about deception; lulling you into something that seems right, normal, too good to be true (The Hostel movies and The Green Inferno come to mind), when really, you don’t know what you’re about to get yourself into. Having two beautiful young women appear at your door, deliberately soaking wet, is the everyday fantasy of the middle-aged man. But the fantasy is our nightmare. There is no escape from our desires; we are human and act on impulse. We have no control.
It takes the girls a minute or so to trick Evan into letting them into his house. Their conversation resembles B-grade porn; Evan tells the girls “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you” with such impotence that he’s practically telling the girls to beg him for his almighty help. Roth’s self-awareness pulls this exchange off with sublime grace.
The porn continues with Roth seducing us with a shot of the women crouched down, taking their clothes off because they “wouldn’t want to mess up the house”. Evan’s crotch is deliberately left in the frame. The girls continue their play-dumb act and we buy it, because we want to buy it. We want to believe the fantasy, to play the game. One of the girls is wearing a shirt that says in capital letters ‘IT WAS ALL A DREAM’ for heavens sake.
The first clue that something wrong is about to happen begins when the camera follows Evan as he gets the two drenched girls some ‘towels’ (excuse the irony). Antonio Quercia’s cinematography in this film is incredible because it encapsulates everything Roth wants to say about his core themes, and gives the film mood. Evan walks down a narrow corridor and we see photos of his family on the wall. Any hesitation or anxiety that may be building is shut down when one of the girls says “Nice house!”, just to remind us to keep playing the game. We continue to follow before the camera stops at Evan opening the door and gathering the towels. The lighting in this moment (but also the entire film) is remarkable, almost Hitchcockian in the way it creates tension through the mere angle of the blinds. Evan collects the towels and keeps moving, and the moment he turns to walk back down the corridor, the women are no longer seen. For a split second, we become worried, before we are reassured that they are just in another room because it is “warmer”. The girls apologise for the hassle to keep nice, and Evan tells them “don’t worry about it, make yourselves at home”. And so they do.
The two aspects that bring atmosphere to the sequence are the location (family house) and the sounds of the rain. We associate our homes with safety, but Evan is anything but safe. As for the rain, it works on a number of levels. The ironic aspect (being ‘wet’ and all), its gloomy nature and the sound itself brings suspense because it doesn’t tell us how to feel like music would; it’s all up the air (literally).