The Knife review – audaciously taut film about police encounter is intense drama of mutual suspicion

Here is a compact drama that twists itself like a tourniquet over 81 minutes, as a bad situation turns into a catastrophe 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 in his own home and sinks a beer or two. He takes a couple of pills before checking on his two young daughters Kendra (Amari Alexis Price) and Ryley (Aiden Gabrielle Price), who have been sneakily pretending to be asleep. Then he gets into bed with wife Alex (Aja Naomi King) for a chat and a soon-abandoned attempt to have exhausted marital sex while their infant baby sleeps next door.

All that quotidian domestic scene-setting is important because it establishes how likeable and unexceptional this Black American family are – before their lives are irrevocably changed. Because after Chris nearly falls asleep, a sound downstairs rouses him and soon a crime will be committed that compels the whole family to switch 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 are hiding something. And they are – but Asomugha’s script, co-written with indie cinema auteur Mark Duplass, barely needs to mention how every encounter between people of colour and the police carries an extra charge of tension and mutual suspicion.

With just a few subtle strokes, the screenplay underscores how everyone here is fudging the truth a bit, and its restraint is the film’s quiet strength. The intensity of the single setting admittedly feels a little theatrical, but there is something audacious about the way this ends when a more conventional, melodramatic film would only be wrapping up its first act. Asomugha and co say all they need to say in this single intense chamber piece.