The Knife review – A daringly taut film about a police standoff that is an intense drama of mutual suspicion | film

Here’s a compact drama that twists like a tourniquet over the course of 81 minutes, as a bad situation turns into disaster for an ordinary American family.

Late one night in an unnamed city, construction worker Chris (Nnamdi Asomugha, also the film’s director and co-writer) finishes a DIY project on his house and drinks a beer or two. He takes two pills before checking on his young daughters Kendra (Amari Alexis Price) and Riley (Eden Gabrielle Price), who have been surreptitiously pretending to be asleep. He then sleeps with his wife Alex (Aja Naomi King) to chat and a soon-to-be-abandoned attempt at exhausting marital sex while their infant sleeps next door.

All of this everyday domestic scene is important because it defines how loving and unexceptional this black American family was—before their lives were irrevocably changed. Because after Chris almost falls asleep, a voice wakes him downstairs and soon a crime will be committed that forces the entire family into a state of understandable paranoia when the police arrive and find a middle-aged white woman bleeding and unconscious on the kitchen floor.

Like the victim, the detective assigned to the case is also a white woman of a certain age. Detective Carlsen (Melissa Leo) suspects the family is hiding something. And they are — but Asomugha’s screenplay, co-written by independent film auteur Mark Duplass, hardly needs mentioning how every encounter between people of color and the police carries an extra charge of tension and mutual suspicion.

With just a few light touches, the screenplay highlights how everyone here fiddles with the truth a little, and its restraint is the film’s quiet strength. Admittedly, the intensity of the single setting feels a bit theatrical, but there’s something bold about the way this ends when a more conventionally melodramatic film is only wrapping up its first act. Asomugha and his bandmates say everything they need to say in this intense solo piece.