It's hard not to think about Haneke's Funny Games when watching Knifepoint. Actually, it's hard not to think about his bone-chilling thriller when watching any given home invasion film. Truth is Haneke's uncompromising work has become somewhat of a reference point in terms of film sadism, amounting to what is probably the finest example of torture porn ever to grace the screen. Although it contains no onscreen violence at all, it manages to handle its subject matter with such technical mastery and dramatic savvy as to virtually nullify any attempt at creating a worthy successor.
The reason for Funny Games' efficiency is threefold. Aside from Haneke's directorial skills, the motiveless nature of the antagonists' crimes and their obvious, and very much emphasized, complicity with the filmmakers serve as rocket-powered engines for the straightforward narrative. The feeling of hopelessness pulsating across the screen is the direct result of these two converging factors. Knowing that 1) the antagonists are pure evil, torturing people without any motivation other than torture itself and 2) the viewers and filmmakers are willing accomplices in their crimes, giving them all the latitude necessary to accomplish their nasty deeds, one is caught between a rock and a hard place, unable to watch, but unable to stop watching either. In the end, we are forced, even tortured into contemplating, and detesting our own sadism by the clever filmmaker who entraps us exactly like he entraps his protagonists.
The fact that Knifepoint is produced independently, without so much as a tenth of the talent at work in the former film has no bearing on the present analysis. After all, Knifepoint is a successful film in its own right. As the director so rightfully put it before the screening, the film is primarily meant to shock and it does so with surprising bravado. By upping the ante in terms of how many despicable acts of torture can be shown in a 88-minute film, it deserves to find a loyal audience of gore fanatics and jaded fans of cinematic extremities.
Submission is the name of the game as the protagonists are raped
and tortured for nearly the entire duration of the film
The opening credits are somewhat misleading in that regard, and they help defuse the explosive potential of the ensemble. Using rhythmic editing and B&W freeze frames of the antagonists setting up their plan, the filmmakers have effectively, and inexplicably, likened them to the suave, hip rogues from recent capers such as the Ocean films. This is a moot point to make, but you cannot show antagonists in such a positive light and then turn the tables 180 degrees and make them out to be bloodthirsty demons from Hell. You must do one or the other, not both. Even better, you can try nuancing the ensemble, which is admittingly a very hard thing to do considering the specific aims of the film, but one that would have given the film a much needed extra dimension. At any rate, there is no point in setting up the antagonists to such an extent. The duration of the credits should've been allotted to the protagonists instead, allowing the filmmakers to shape them out a little better in order to make us more sympathetic to their plight, which is filmed without a hint of humor to spare our feelings. In fact, any extra attempt at characterization would've been appreciated, or any effort to capitalize on some facts established early on (such as the rivalry between the two sister protagonists). Because as it stands, the narrative clams up once the slaughter starts and the remainder of the film plays like a series of surprisingly uninvolving vignettes.
All bad guys look the part in Knifepoint
Setting up the antagonists as robbers does little to account for their barbarity. If indeed they had been mere robbers, as the intricacy of their plan suggests, they should not want to kill people, and especially in that amount. Of course, there's some slight psychosis affecting the group, but this contradicts the more Cartesian aspects of their psyche at work here. In the end, what it all boils down to is a crime spree perpetrated by inhuman, prison-trained criminals. So you can either see the film as purely a shock film meant to test the limits of one's endurance to disgusting, gratuitous violence or, to a lesser extent, you can see it as a critique of the American prison system and its manufacturing of hardened criminals. Whether or not you want to scratch the surface a bit is up to you but frankly, I can't say that I recommend it for you are unlikely to find anything really meaty underneath.
Seeing how the film is bursting with close-ups of flesh scraps hanging from various types of weapons, I am tempted to think the film as merely a gross-out fest, which isn't bad in itself, considering the type of audiences at which the film is aimed. However, it will never achieve greatness for it is founded on a contradiction of intentions crystallized in the burning desire to explain the inexplicable. A case example of this is the final rape scene. Before the main antagonist proceeds to rape the patriarch with his gun, he starts telling him about the rationale behind prison rape. He goes on to tell him that in prison, rape is made independently of pleasure, even desire. Apparently, it is merely a means to break one's spirit. And so, before jamming a gun in his ass, he assures him that he takes no pleasure out of it, but does it simply for business purposes. Not only is all of this bullshit (there's a direct connection between horniness and prison rape), but it impairs the sense of horror one might derive from such a rape scene. Because it allows the viewer to circumvent the event not as a manifestation of evil, but as a practical action. That said, it is what the mind can't conceive which terrifies it most, and that is how the horror genre has established itself as such a lasting form of expression. Bearing more resemblances to the psychological thriller than to the horror film per se, Knifepoint lacks the dramatic content to make it all stick.
Actually, it is narrative ambivalence which almost sinks the film. Because in the end, Knifepoint is made of restrained excess, hesitating between total gross-out horror and psychological drama, as if unsure of either one's potential to drive the story. By maximizing the bloodletting, it tends to tilt toward horror, but by circumventing it within the confines of a home invasion film, it penetrates the realm of genre-less cinema, with so-so results. Luckily for us, the film lives up to its tagline by offering a record amount of meaty grub, which allows it to redeem itself but only for a thin slice of film audiences, that of jaded gorehounds.
2,5/5: Mean and disgusting, this one will manage to impress even the most hardened gorehounds. Unfortunately, it will not impress anybody else.
