Film

Knock Knock

Name: Knock Knock
Genre: Horror, Thriller, Crime
Released: 2015
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Lorenza Izzo, Ana de Armas, Aaron Burns, Colleen Camp

Other titles called Knock Knock: the 1940 film.

Eli Roth's nasty home-invasion thriller puts Keanu Reeves as a family man tested by two women who arrive soaking wet and seduce their way into his house. It's a rape-revenge premise inverted, uncomfortable and sweaty, designed to provoke rather than comfort. For viewers who like their moral ground unstable.

TMDb rating

2.7

If you liked this

A Clockwork Orange1971

Kubrick's savage provocation about violence, desire and control remains shockingly potent. Like Knock Knock, it uses transgression to ask whether cinema can show us things we'd rather not see.

But The sexual violence is graphic and dehumanising. It's punishing to watch, even when that's precisely the point.

Bound1996

The Wachowskis craft a taut, sexy thriller where seduction is weaponised and nobody's quite who they seem. Tense, clever, and genuinely thrilling in ways Knock Knock aspires to be.

But It's twenty-five years old and the pacing assumes you're paying close attention. Modern blockbusters move faster.

You're Next2013

Home invasion becomes a puzzle-box where the victim fights back with terrifying competence. Darkly funny and tautly directed, it has the same cruel energy without the didactic moralising.

But It's a genre film that knows it's a genre film. If you want thematic depth, look elsewhere.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Knock Knock

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Irreversible2002

Both films use provocation to examine violation, but Irréversible asks us to sit with the devastation rather than the seduction. It's the inverse of Roth's framing.

Noé tells a rape story backwards, chronologically, so you watch the aftermath before the horror. It's about the weight of trauma rather than the transgression itself. Structurally radical and genuinely harrowing.

But The camera rarely stops moving and the sound design is deliberately punishing. Watching it feels like endurance. Also: extreme sexual violence, shown frankly.

Oldboy2003

Park Chan-wook's revenge masterpiece traps you in escalating transgression. Every scene builds unbearable tension. It's what Roth was trying to do, executed with absolute precision.

But The violence is extreme and the third act turns the knife in ways that linger. Not cathartic. Not kind.

Teeth2008

Mitchell Lichtenstein's horror-comedy about a girl with vagina dentata is genuinely inventive body-horror that uses its premise to examine sexual coercion. Sharp, strange, darkly funny.

But The premise is deliberately grotesque. If you can't laugh at discomfort, this won't work for you.

Sleepless Night2011

Bédouin directs this French thriller with kinetic precision—a father fighting through night-time violence to protect his son. Tense, visceral, almost wordless. Pure cinema.

But Subtitled. The plot is secondary to the relentless momentum, which some find exhausting rather than exciting.

Mulholland Drive2001

Lynch builds a film about deception, desire and Hollywood's cruelty that shifts beneath you like sand. Seduction is weaponised here too, but with fractured, dreamlike precision that deepens with rewatching.

But It demands interpretation rather than offering answers. Some find that liberating; others find it pretentious.

The Handmaiden2016

Park Chan-wook again, this time as a con game spirals into something genuinely transgressive and strange. Two women seduce a man, but nothing is what it seems. Gorgeous and cruel.

But The sexual content is explicit and the story invites comparison between colonialism and seduction. Not escapism.

Inside2007

Martyrs' companion piece—a French extreme horror film about invasion and violation that treats its horror with absolute seriousness. If you want transgression without irony, this delivers it.

But It's bleak, graphic and offers no catharsis. Made to disturb rather than entertain. Very hard watch.

Stalker1979

Both centre on three people trapped in a confined space where sexual and psychological boundaries dissolve, but Tarkovsky is interested in desire as philosophy, Roth as horror-provocation.

Tarkovsky's three-hour sci-fi meditation about a man guiding two others through a forbidden zone is glacially paced and hypnotic. Two men enter the private space of a house; what happens is entirely internal and philosophical.

But Soviet. Slow. Almost nothing happens visibly. If you want plot momentum or American movie grammar, you'll be bored.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover1989

Both use extreme content to ask what cinema can show us, but Greenaway aestheticises transgression while Roth wants it raw and ugly. See them together to understand the difference.

Peter Greenaway's baroque, visually stunning film about seduction, invasion and revenge in a restaurant. Violence and transgression become formal beauty. Obscene and brilliant and almost painterly.

But It's aggressively artificial and more interested in design than character. The transgression can read as style over substance. Definitely not naturalistic.