Although occasionally unbalanced, the heart-warming, Darjeeling-set Knock Knock Knock mostly sustains our interest thanks to its two leading men.
India
3.5*
Director:
Sudhanshu Saria
Screenwriter:
Sudhanshu Saria
Director of Photography:
Achyutanand Dwivedi
Running time: 38 minutes
Lines intersect in director Sudhanshu Saria’s first medium-length film, entitled Knock Knock Knock. But the patterns they form and the nature of their content aren’t always apparent. On the heels of his successful début feature, Loev, Saria has crafted another story focused almost solely on the interactions between two men. This time around, however, the contours are much hazier, and the film may well frustrate viewers looking for clear answers.
Their first meeting happens, seemingly by chance, in the opening scene. Sitting alone at a table on the balcony of a café (Keventer’s, whose breathtaking view was made for the big screen) in Darjeeling, a quiet, focused, middle-aged man (Santilal Mukherjee) is designing a crossword puzzle. We see him misspell the word “camouflage”. Maybe it’s because he is distracted by prying eyes at the next table: They belong to a lively young man, whose clothing is conspicuously similar in colour to his own. His name, at least according to the credits, is Keta (Phuden Sherpa). When he realises he’s been noticed, he comes over to start chatting. He says that he designs tattoos, never wears shoes (according to him, they trap his energy) and is 22 years old. The older man, whom he affectionately calls “Dada” (father), is not that dissimilar after all: For the last 22 years, he has been coming here from Kolkata on vacation to design crosswords.
The meeting, which also involves some bizarre talk about parabolas, ends the way it began, with Dada looking over his shoulder at Keta. The scene’s perfect bookend structure makes us wonder whether the encounter may have been imagined, and it won’t be the last time.
The next day, Dada is jogging when Keta sneaks up behind him to join his knight-like moves through the rolling hills. But we quickly view him with some suspicion because, despite his proclamation to the contrary the day before, he is now wearing shoes. And yet, he is bubbling with spirit and spontaneity and projects a childlike curiosity that is completely irresistible.
Things start to unravel a bit with an extended dream/nightmare sequence that swings between serenity and sudden scares and leads into the least clearly defined part of the story, which is, unfortunately, also the final act. Regrettably, the plot doesn’t turn explicitly into a ghost story, which could have been fun, nor does it work to emphasise a spiritual connection between the two characters until the very last moment.
When an uptight introvert meets an ebullient extrovert in a film, it is supposed to generate conflict, which gives dramatic energy to the narrative, but Knock Knock Knock has no conflict and, therefore, no real drama to speak of. The opening scene has a wonderful two-minute single take that starts to delve into the two characters a little bit, but some important information is delivered in a rush, almost as an aside, and no other scene elaborates on the details we get here.
For close to 40 minutes, Mukherjee manages to sustain our interest in Dada. By the end, however, we still know too little about him to care about this character, so when the climax comes, it falls flat. Keta, who always appears out of nowhere, is even more of a blank slate: He exists only in relation to Dada, and this relationship never becomes anything more than superficial.
Knock Knock Knock is clearly a personal film for the director (it’s his hands drawing the crossword puzzle in the opening shot). But given the ambiguity and lack of urgency, it does not hold the same emotional sway as Loev and never achieves the balance that its characters refer to. “Nothing is random, right? There’s a pattern in everything”, says Keta, but the pattern here can be hard to decipher. Never awkward enough to thrill us and never intimate enough to really make us care, the clues to this film, itself a kind of crossword puzzle, are too vague and leave us with a few rows unfilled.
There are some interesting ideas here, from the resemblance between a crossword puzzle and a chessboard to a climactic shot showing only one of the characters where we expect to see both. The key to unlocking the central mystery may very well lie in Dada misspelling “camouflage”, which is precisely where the narrative proper starts, but the viewer has to let her imagination do the work to fill in the blanks.