Psychological Horror 'Knocking' Set For Limited Theatrical US Release

After suffering a traumatic incident, Molly (Cecilia Milocco) moves into a new apartment to begin her path to recovery, but it’s not long after her arrival that a series of persistent knocks and screams begin to wake her up at night. Molly’s new life begins to unravel as the screams intensify and no one else in the building believes or is willing to help her.

We’ve seen this type of psychological horror before: someone whose sanity is questioned by others around them while experiencing something only they can identify with no proof to support their case. Knocking tries to do something unique with this formula, encapsulating the source and extension of our main character Molly’s terror entirely within her apartment room.

Molly makes an effort to start rebuilding her life and finds difficulty settling into something she would consider normal. She doesn’t appear to know what to do with herself once she’s truly alone. She goes to the grocery store and ends up buying an absurd amount of fruit, spending an inordinately long period of time doing so. Despite her valiant efforts to reconnect with people the knocking keeps her from this. But here she runs into something she hasn’t experienced before. No matter how she inquires about her concerns about the knocking sounds, especially repeatedly (which in this film is more than twice) she is nevertheless seen as a “recovering mental patient” that needs to be kept an eye on lest she becomes unruly in her pursuit of the truth. This is where the film has the potential to make a unique stand in its frankly admirable portrait of a person who is mentally ill.

Knocking unfortunately keeps too much of Molly in the dark, disallowing the audience to really connect with her. The fragments of what we do get are summarily tantalizing but never really swings into focus, a trauma that feels more buried than overcome. The film treats Molly not as focusing on her trauma in lieu of a character, although she is largely a mystery (to herself as well). It still does something other films centered around mental illness sadly don’t do and that’s to avoid demonizing and sensationalizing her illness and spin it into something just to sell the premise for a shallow finale. It does however hold its cards much too long as the conclusion is paced lopsidedly in this reviewer’s opinion.

The film doesn’t cover a lot of ground as the running time is within 70 or so minutes but even then feels like a short film stretched into a feature with not a whole lot of meat on its bones. It doesn’t have to have a lot going on but instead passes the time between events with little happening. Whether filling the time is something Molly’s character is incapable of doing because of her readjustment or a deliberate decision made by the direction of the film it creates a void of silence that swallows up the dilemma intrinsic to the center of Knocking’s mystery.

You can see a list of theaters across the US screening the film at this link or visit knocking-film.com for more information. In theaters starting October 8.

[this article was originally published on october 6, 2021 on celluloidconsomme.medium.com.]