Review #344: Knock Knock (2015)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #17 - Knock Knock (2015)
Knock Knock is a movie where America's sweetheart Keanu Reeves plays a husband and father left on his own while the family goes on vacation so he can stay home and get work done. But when two attractive young girls show up out of the blue and seduce him, he ultimately gives in, leading to these two girls blackmailing and torturing him in a deadly game of lies and lust.
(There's going to be some spoilers in here but I don't think it's anything that will ruin the enjoyment of the movie; you kind of get what you expect with this kind of film so I'm using my best judgment.)
It's going to be hard not to draw parallels between this movie and Funny Games (which I'm just now realizing I've never reviewed; stay tuned): both are stories about a pair of sociopaths weaseling their way into the lives of an unsuspecting family until they're so entrenched that the family has no choice but to play party to whatever sick amusement the intruders want. I think the big difference here is that Keanu Reeves' character is involved in this because of something he did that he knew was wrong (as opposed to Funny Games, where the family did nothing wrong, the intruders are just evil).
When the movie first started and the girls showed up, I assumed it would be a story where he was perfectly blameless, but nobody was going to believe him that these two hot girls showed up randomly and then got naked of their own accord- after his wife knew he was unsatisfied with their love life, and his wife's coworker made jokes about him throwing a secret party when his family was out of town. That alone would have been enough to blackmail this guy for being unfaithful to his wife, right? But Knock Knock goes so much further than that- he DOES sleep with both of these girls, he IS unfaithful to his wife, but that's barely even a blip on this movie's radar because the actual blackmail comes from the girls telling him that they're both underage, so he won't even have the recourse of calling the police because it would be far worse for him than for them. That, too, seems like it would be enough, but then the villains don't stop at the idea of blackmailing or manipulating him- they knock him out, tie him up, and then just basically torture him for the rest of the movie. Any one of these three things could have worked, or I suppose it could have been possible to have one naturally evolve into the other, but then the end of the movie still treats it as a reveal that the girls AREN'T underage after all. It's weird because like, why would that even matter? Torture, murder, and disposing of a body are such worse crimes than statutory rape, that I don't think anyone (in the audience or in the movie) are still holding onto "Oh no what if the cops find out they had sex" at that point.
To compare this to another, similar movie, Hard Candy (2005) is a film about an underage girl who traps and tortures a man for being a pedophile, but the point of that movie is that he already was a pedophile. Elliot Page's character knew that before the movie started. In Knock Knock, these girls seduce a man, make him think he's committed pedophilia, and torture him for being a pedophile, despite the fact that they know he isn't one (and both actresses were in their late 20s so neither looks believably underage in my opinion, so it's weird for the movie to expect the audience to believe it when even in-universe it's not true). It's just such a muddled film plot I wonder if this was the intent from the beginning or if this was two scripts mashed together (or maybe even a partial rewrite after the ~27-year-old actresses had been cast).
I'm focusing on the nitty gritty plot details but there's a lot else in here to complain about too. I don't think any of the performances are very good, even from Keanu Reeves. Maybe it's the dialogue, maybe it's the characterization- this just isn't a very good movie. It requires so much suspension of disbelief and certain parts of it raise so many questions about the implied worldbuilding that it's hard to take this seriously. (Like, the girls allude to having a contact that will dispose of a body for them. So are they random sociopaths or are they part of some larger network of criminals?) I know it's easy to watch movies like this and say "If it were me, I would have done X or Y" but I feel like there's some real no-brainers in this one.
This was an uncomfortable movie, which I'm sure was the intent. But it's just a little bit too stupid to get under my skin the way something like Funny Games does.
You could do worse than this movie but you could do a LOT better too.
Overall Rating: 5/10 Pieces of Ugly Art
Alternate Ending: On the DVD/Blu-Ray combo release of his film, there's an alternate/extended ending included where Evan is able to track the girls' whereabouts using a GPS tracker in the dog's collar. (I didn't realize they stole the dog, but apparently that was the case, at least in this alternate ending.) He then hunts them down and kills them, similar to something like John Wick. However, this ending apparently felt too much like a slasher movie, so it was ultimately cut.
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