Knocking

I recently watched the Swedish film 🇸🇪 Knocking (2021) on Shudder. The storyline follows a woman who has recently been released from a psychiatric ward and is beginning her new life in a new apartment. However, she hears strange knocking from the ceiling and walls. Is she losing her mind, or is her apartment haunted?

Directed by Frida Kempff (Winter Buoy), the film stars Cecilia Milocco (The Circle), Ville Virtanen (Bad Family), Charlotta Åkerblom (Agent Hamilton), and Emil Almén (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).

This movie focuses on a woman's deteriorating mental state with little else driving the plot. While the acting is solid and the ending is very good, it's a long, slow, laborious journey to get there. The film offers a unique depiction of an individual's mental state, and the special effects at the end are effective in portraying the struggle between truth and reality. It's a poignant reminder of the battles many people face, with or without paranormal phenomena.

In conclusion, Knocking has some interesting elements but not enough to stand out in the genre. I would score it a 5/10 and recommend skipping.

Knocking is about a woman who leaves a psychiatric ward after a nervous breakdown, but she soon begins hearing mysterious knocking sounds in her apartment. Of course, any midnight horror movie is going to catch my attention and this happened to be one of the ones I really wanted to see. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to what I wanted it to be. Knocking follows a typical indie slow-burn about someone who may or may not be crazy. The movie tries to play smart, but we're all immune to any shock factor that comes our way. Everything is something we've seen before, yet I still found the movie entertaining. Cecilia Milocco gives a good performance that drives the whole thing. We know her history in mental health and an event that has scarred her which is fine for character development. My issue is because we know this, the whole time we're thinking she's crazy and hearing this. The end does play around with us leaving an ambiguous answer. For a 78-minute runtime it didn't feel all there, but maybe as a short this would've worked wonders. It's serviceable but nothing too special.

Great performance from the lead. I felt her fear and anxiety the entire runtime. My wife and I were both felt so stressed and empathetic to the protagonists suffering.

After sitting with the ending overnight, I also really enjoyed it. It leaves me feeling happy, oddly enough.

Perhaps my favorite horror from Sundance? Censor was good too.

Give it a watch and stress out with our hero!

Knocking is more of a psychological thriller than a classic horror film, dealing with the idea of gaslighting and mental illness.

The story could be summed up in a sentence and the pacing is rather slow, but the cinematography is great - and as the film progresses so do the mental prisons of it's protagonist break and reveal the true reality.

After her release from psychiatric care, a woman's attempt to settle into a new apartment is disturbed by a series of upsetting events.

Not-so-tight psychological thriller that left me unsatisfied. The main strength is the lead performance, which presents a difficult character who causes everyone around to take a step back. Plenty of close-ups, and a couple of scenes where psychotic-breaks are represented by body-cam focused on the actor's face as she moves around.

The story tries to have the apartment block stand in for society, with its well-meaning but uncomprehending reaction to the protagonist's deteriorating state. But it also seems to stand for her own psyche, as she insists that a woman is dying within its walls. It might have helped if we knew what she was actually missing through the unspecified tragedy in the flashbacks. Just companionship? But why would that induce psychosis? In the end the story seems to insist that the experience was all literally true, and does it through voice-over rather than imagery - not a great way to finish off a piece of cinema.

Just too many discrepancies left for me - am I supposed to believe the other residents and the social services were in bad faith? - and I always thinks it's a mistake for a psychic story to insist on literal truth, because it takes away the nuance that allows meaning to find a place in the gaps in the official version.

The editing is good, but the pace was a bit of a drag, mostly because the woman's behaviour became tiresome. Music and sound design created good tension.

Overall: Simple story that sedated its own psychology.