About a month ago, I moved into a new apartment to live by myself for the first time in half a decade. The boxing up, the unboxing , the anxious pets and depressive puttering—everything that goes along with the process ate away at my psyche like moths at stored sweaters. Not least of which were the sounds: Unfamiliar noises in foreign rooms, they could mean anything from a call to the super to an annoying new normal that you just have to live with.
While you nod, nearly napping, suddenly there’ll come a…knocking. Recently released from a psychiatric facility, Molly is plagued by a knock on her new ceiling and recurring dreams of a lost loved one. The dream-memories, comfortable and warm and luxuriant, are fantasies cursed to end, which Kempff portends with the kind of uncanny tone-shifts that make you realize a dream’s turning into a nightmare and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Then she wakes up. Back in her shitty apartment.
This noise becomes a tense and spooky haunting—and one, by virtue of its locale, that turns its focus from an unfeeling healthcare system to the actual experience of the person who needs help in the first place. Is someone knocking on their floor? Does Molly need to help? Or does she justhelp? Milocco, all tight lips, furrowed brow and flop sweat, is an eminently sympathetic vessel of stress as she tries to figure this out.
From this quasi-supernatural sound springs the buried demons of paranoia, madness, pride and loss—all heightened by the stressors of a well-realized environment and haunted by realistic threats like gaslighting and domestic violence. Molly visits neighbors about the knock to no avail, but if you can’t trust your own senses…well, it’s a more attractive proposition that the world is lying to you than that you’re being fooled by your own mind.
Derelict set decoration and spinning shot choices create claustrophobia more effective than the script’s uneven arcs, communicating more with less than the film’s plot and unconvincing finale. It’s hard to feel repetitive in only 78 minutes, but’s slight story pushes even this blissfully brisk runtime to the limits.
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