Tribeca Review: A Black Family's Home Invasion Twists 'The Knife' Into Unbearable Tension

The Criterion Channel recently featured a collection of films titled “One Night” which featured movies like Collateral, After Hours and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where, like the title says, all of the action unspooled over the course of a single night. It’s a time-tested sub-genre that seems to work more often than it doesn’t, memorably engulfing us in a moment while plinking on the ticking clock strings of tension and claustrophobia before the sun rises and with its rays ends our story. Well, add another classic to the collection because writer, director, and lead actor Nnamdi Asomugha’s The Knife, about the aftermath of a home invasion on a Black family, is an exquisitely crafted and acted example of what these pictures can do at their best.

Chris (Asomugha) is a construction worker who’s finally earned enough money to buy his family—including his elementary school teacher wife Alex (Aja Naomi King), their two daughters Kendra and Ryley (played by real-life sisters Amari and Aiden Price), and an infant—their own home. It’s not quite the “dream” home, at least not yet—it needs a lot of work, which Chris has been staying up late at night in between his shifts to get done. And it’s not in the best neighborhood either. But none of that seems to matter inside those walls, where this loving family seems genuinely happy and at peace. Sure Chris’s daughters comment on the beer they can smell on his breath as he tucks them in, but this could be any family anywhere in America on any given night.

Until, on this fateful evening at hand, Chris is woken up by a sound in the other room. Just the smallest creak in the floorboards, but it’s enough to sit him straight upright while Alex keeps dozing away at his side. He waits, peering into the silence, trying to make his mind believe it’d tricked itself… and then it hits. Another creak. Asomugha, who gives a perfectly understated performance as Chris, wisely plays up the disorientation of the moment—we can see all the possibilities playing out on his face. Frozen, compelled to action, confused, terrified—it’s the twister of contradictory impulses every single one of us would face in such a moment.

Chris manages to rise, get halfway across the room, and then he stops, doubling back as he realizes he needs some protection if he’s about to confront a stranger in his house. If that’s what it is. Maybe one of the girls got up? But here lands the first of many fateful instinctual actions that will spin this fateful evening off its axis, and this happy family toward a possibly much unhappier fate—Chris pulls a knife (yes, the titular character) out of his bedside drawer.

An entire piece of its own could be probably written on why Asomugha and co-writer Mark Duplass decided Chris would have a knife on hand for protection and not a gun, but the answer I imagine cuts pretty close to what the whole of The Knife is about—the film knows that Chris having a gun for protection while being a Black man in America plays very differently than it would if this was a white family. Chris, his wife and daughters, and the film watching them, are all aware of those differences. And those differences will quickly become the infuriating engine fueling the evening, and its keenly observed main source of tension.

Because there is indeed an intruder in Chris’ house. And it’s perhaps the worst option possible for a Black man to be forced to confront. Chris (who rather infuriatingly refuses to turn on any lights as he wanders the house—come on Chris!) comes upon an older, clearly disoriented white woman standing in the corner of his dark kitchen.

What happens next drives the entire film. And we’re as in the dark about it as anyone because Asomugha’s camera cruelly cuts back to Alex asleep in bed, being woken up by the loud sudden sounds coming from the kitchen. We watch her and the girls rush into the kitchen, where together they find Chris standing over the woman’s body laying silent, unmoving on the floor. Chris is in shock. They know they have to call 9-1-1. And unlike what a white family would be worrying about in this moment, this Black one knows that inviting a police presence into their home, where a maybe dead white woman is laying on the floor, might mean something else entirely. They have to get their stories straight. Maybe the ambulance will arrive first? Nope—that’s a cop car.

And from there, the fateful decisions start piling up, one small one on top of one small one, each making some sense to the person doing them in their moment, but each ultimately shooting this family’s story off in directions they never could have dreamed or would have intended. What The Knife most reminded me of were the moral quandaries introduced by the films of the brilliant humanist director Asghar Fahardi from Iran—great movies like About Elly and A Separation where good intentions and human foibles all lead to unintended disaster. If Farhadi were able to make a movie about the Black American Experience, I think it would look very much like The Knife, and that might be as high a compliment I can hand out to a first-time filmmaker.

As the police enter the story—there’s a watchful first responder (played by Manny Jacinto) and a seasoned detective (a stellar turn from Melissa Leo, awash in contradictions) who separates the family to question them one by one—the family’s nerves begin to get the best of them. And that in turn has its own consequences. Asomugha masterfully tightens the film’s noose around his characters and his viewers, and all of us are caught up together in the quicksand of an impossible situation. Chris and his family cannot afford to be anything less than perfect. But unfortunately they’re only human. And The Knife walks that tragic edge masterfully.