Sundance: ‘Knocking’ Boasts A Great Central Performance In An Otherwise Thin Thriller

Knocking begins by introducing us to Molly (Cecelia Milocco) napping on a beach. Her girlfriend is about to take a swim, when tragedy strikes offscreen. We next see her after some time has passed, now leaving a psychiatric ward. Molly is clearly plagued by the mysterious past tragedy and suffers a constant plague of anxieties. Still, Molly enters her new life, her new apartment, with subtle (if not pained) hope.

And then the knocking starts.

First, an obnoxious but persistent knocking. Occasionally, hard-to-place voices that come ambiguously from above. Molly becomes increasingly frazzled, obsessed with discovering the source of the knocking—and thoroughly convinced that a woman, somewhere, is in danger.

Frida Kempff’s Knocking is an engaging enough thriller at a slim 78 minutes, but even then it at times seems too thin to sustain even that length. The most successful element of the film is Milocco’s performance; Molly as written seems to be a nearly one note character, a bundle of anxieties with little else given to the audience to round out the character. Milocco nonetheless manages to bring a lot of subtlety and nuance to the role, adding significant complexity and emotion to what could have been a simplistic portrayal.

As the knocking and Molly’s investigation escalate, the increasing tension is palpable largely due as well to Milocco’s performance. At the same time, the elements of the investigation, which largely take place in her apartment complex, begin to feel claustrophobic and sparse as the film often settles into a repetitive structure—Molly hears knocking, investigates a neighbor, is denied, hears more knocking, investigates a different neighbor, etc. It’s a sequence that makes the already slim script feel long at times.

The end pulls together with an interesting twist, adding a novel parable about gaslighting to the narrative as a whole and elevating the story overall. Still, the end could have landed on slightly more solid footing if there had been a little more clues throughout, or if Molly’s multiple investigations were a little more fruitful in their results.

Altogether, Knocking is that rare film where simplicity proves a vice instead of a virtue. A little more nuance and fleshing out and Molly could have proven a more rounded out character with a more engaging investigation. (It should be reiterated that Milocco’s performance added an exceptional amount of depth to a character that was thinly written, and it should be commended). As it stands, Knocking felt less like a full film and more like a long short story, falling a little short of its potential.