The film critic’s impulse to champion auteurist extravagance over solid but not showily executed directorial and writerly competency is an understandable one; we live in a time and place where studio (in)competence is standardized to such an extent that whenever we see anything different — yes, even something as cacophonously calamitous as Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis — we want to praise it for at the very least being unabashedly, and unironically, its own spectacular self. Is that a fair expectation to impose upon all artists, though? Is art the highest form of art only when an identifiable style is the film’s main substance? What about artists — like, say, Asghar Farhadi (A Separation), the Dardenne Brothers (Two Days, One Night), or to a lesser extent, Cristian Mungiu (R.M.N.) — who sublimate (critically, however, do not eliminate) said style to writerly substance?
Nnamdi Asomugha’s directorial feature debut, The Knife, is a less subtle (but no less involving) American cousin to these gut-wrenchingly humanist but largely unflashy faux-realist dramas. Its bookending voiceovers commit the sin of explicating the themes of the film too clearly (“My grandma used to say: life presents choices. And choices lead to consequences… once you make a choice, you gotta expect what comes with it.”). But otherwise, it’s a rare American indie film content on letting its stripped-down drama speak for itself: no ostentatious camerawork, janky editing, or ear-scraping background score force the film’s “truth is subjective” message upon you. Asomugha, who co-wrote the film with Mark Duplass, creates a tightly plotted, almost cutthroat moral thriller that builds upon the minutest of lived-in details and pre-existing racial prejudices to show how a young Black family’s life falls apart over the course of a night because of the sudden appearance of a mysterious white stranger.
The film’s audio-visual language is merely “functional” here: almost invisibly in service of the drama and not, for instance, like the impressive but equally intrusive single-take episodes of Adolescence, overly demonstrative about it. And while that lack of demonstrative formal gimmickry means The Knife will have fewer people going ga-ga over it, it’s also really what makes the film feel so nerve-shreddingly tense. Asomugha expertly sets up the film and his characters without drawing attention to his rather accomplished minimalist form. We see Chris, the patriarch of the family (played by Asomugha himself), finish up working on one of his daughters’ bedrooms, then go out to drink beer, then visit his children’s room, who say he “smells of beer,” before finally returning to his bedroom to his wife, Alexandra (Aja Naomi King), half-heartedly trying to seduce him. But rather than capturing all this in one take — a technique that would likely, if anything, come across more distracting than involving — Asomugha and his cinematographer Alejandro Mejía (who, surprisingly, won Best Cinematography for The Knife when it premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2024) utilize the simple but effective combination of handheld camerawork that prioritizes close-ups over wide shots, no background score that naturally heightens the distant but ominous sounds of dogs barking and police sirens ringing, and little to no expository dialogue to make dynamics between the family feel believable. What’s more, everything here takes place at night, so it’s not the (unnatural) lighting that’s guiding us around a new place; it’s Chris, casually walking around a place he knows from the inside out. The darkness is not, then, a sign of danger or threat; it’s a space, at least for Chris and his family, of comfort, even intimacy.
It’s no surprise that everything that follows once the mysterious stranger shows up in Chris’ home takes place with all the blindingly clear white lights switched on. The police cars and leading Detective Carlsen (a connivingly forceful Melissa Leo) separate the family members to question each of them about what really happened between Chris and the now seemingly dead mysterious stranger. Each of the four interrogation sequences is drawn out, with Asomugha again taking the time to emphasize Chris and his family’s jitteriness at every turn: the testimonies, detailed as they are, always feel susceptible to scrutiny — not because the filmmaker employs some nausea-inducing shaky cam, but because he intercuts the supposed truth they’re telling the detective with almost impressionistic images of what they’re really thinking about. It’s the flashiest piece of filmmaking that’s used repeatedly in The Knife, but, again, never at the expense of its drama. In other words, it’s all impactfully rudimentary in the best possible sense — and sometimes that restraint, more than any flamboyant auteurist trick, is enough.
DIRECTOR: Nnamdi Asomugha; CAST: Nnamdi Asomugha, Aja Naomi King, Melissa Leo, Aiden Gabrielle Price; DISTRIBUTOR: Relativity Media; IN THEATERS: August 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 22 min.
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