Most women have a story about the time they either helped out or were helped out by another woman in a dangerous situation. We pretend to be long-lost friends and cousins at the bar, when a man won't take no for an answer and we're worried that he'll turn violent in the face of rejection. We walk each other to our cars after late shifts. We send our locations to each other during rideshare trips, and generally treat each others' safety with the seriousness that many men won't. We tend to listen to intuition when it tells us that a situation isn't right, such as if we witness a couple arguing and one exhibits signs of abuse or coercion.

But here's the rub: Women's warnings and concerns are often dismissed, so systemically that an abuser could easily take advantage and continue their operations unbothered. Frieda Kempff understands this dynamic and exploits it for dread in "Knocking," Kempff's feature debut and adaptation of Johan Theorin's novel of the same name ("Knackningar" in Swedish). In Kempff's slow-burn psychological thriller, a grieving woman slowly unravels as she begins to hear knocking noises behind the walls of her apartment. The synopsis, from Yellow Veil Pictures:

After suffering a traumatic incident, Molly (Cecilia Milocco) moves into a new apartment to begin her path to recovery, but it's not long after her arrival that a series of persistent knocks and screams begin to wake her up at night. Molly's new life begins to unravel as the screams intensify and no one else in the building believes or is willing to help her.

It's the sort of movie that undermines the viewer's sense of reality, swinging between reality and hysteria but refusing to give the audience anything that can definitively confirm or deny that what Molly is seeing is true. Check out the exclusive clip below.

'Sure Everything Is Fine?'

The clip shows Molly (Milocco) at the door along with a policeman, after she has called for assistance with an incident she witnessed. Molly claims that she saw a couple struggling outside the apartment building earlier, and insists that the short-haired woman before her (who is being held closely by her male companion) was forced back into the building when she tried to leave. For their part, both the woman and the man shrug off the whole thing as an argument, and nothing more.

This comes after Molly begins the film discharged from the psych ward of a hospital following a trauma she's still processing — so is Molly okay? Is she feeling guilt for a loss she thinks she could have prevented, and projecting that onto this woman and the knocking noises she hears around her flat? Or is there really someone in the building who needs help? Well … what does your gut tell you?

Founded in 2018 and launched out of Fantasia International Film Festival, Yellow Veil Pictures is a boutique sales company that has repped Tilman Singer's "Luz" by Screen Media, Larry Fessenden's "Depraved" by IFC Midnight, and Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King's adult fantasy animation "The Spine of Night," coming to Shudder.

"Knocking" premiered at Sundance in January of 2021 and will be released in the fall.

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The post New Clip From Knocking Teases Precarious Encounters appeared first on /Film.