01/02/2021 - We chatted to the Swedish director about her feature debut, a tense thriller about mysterious goings-on in an apartment building

(© Erik Andersson)

Playing at both Sundance and Göteborg this season, Sweden’s Knocking [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Frida Kempff
film profile], a tense and tightly drawn tale of mysterious goings-on in an apartment building (or possibly in the head of the distraught protagonist?), is an impressive first fiction feature from Frida Kempff. No newcomer to the field herself, and with several acclaimed shorts and documentaries on her CV, among them Bathing Mickey, Circles and Winter Buoy, Kempff is now a fully fledged maker of long-format stories.

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Cineuropa: The universe of Knocking is very classic thriller territory – a trauma vortex and a fair bit of gaslighting on the way. Where did you find your inspirations?
Frida Kempff: I very much agree. Quite early on, I thought a lot about Polanski and his “Apartment Trilogy”: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant. They all offer claustrophobic locations and senses of alienation that are very interesting. I was also inspired by my own childhood, growing up with a mother who was a welfare officer at school. At home, the phone would ring constantly, and there’d be young girls who were in a bad way or were abused, and I remember them and how my mother engaged with them and their situation. There are also a few sprinkles of David Lynch here and there in the mix. Take all that and put it through a female point of view – that’s my working method here.

The origin of the story is a short novella by Johan Theorin, who also wrote Echoes of the Dead, adapted by Daniel Alfredson in 2013. How did you work with the adaptation process?
It’s a very short novella, less than 30 pages, but it certainly struck a chord with me. It raises social questions, the format has great possibilities for image and sound, it has confined spaces, especially the apartment, and it has just one main protagonist with only a few other participants. More than anything else, there are elements here that invite us to really delve deep into, and gradually get lost in, the story.

As great as the novella is, it had some aspects that worked well on the page but less well on the screen, so I changed things around a bit. Firstly, the victim is present almost from page one in the book, and goes through all kinds of graphic cruelties. That one had to go. I also made the main character younger, from 75 to 50 years old. This gives her some other opportunities in life.

I’ve still never met the author, only communicated via his agent, but he’s seemingly pleased. He did waive his original executive-producer credit, though, as he now thinks this is an entirely new story. I still don’t know what he thinks of the film.

Over two decades, you have made a number of documentaries and especially several well-received shorts, like your 2010 Cannes jury winner Bathing Mickey. When did fiction features enter your plan?
Subconsciously, they’ve been around for a long time, but consciously since around 2015. I had made a documentary where I felt confined at times, in that I wanted to make enhancements that would have twisted reality. I then took the theme from this documentary, Winter Buoy, and started to create a fictional story around it. Regrettably, after four years of development, I got the thumbs-down from the film institute. After licking my wounds for a short while, I stumbled upon Knocking, and here we are.

And there’s more to come. Right now, I’m planning another adaptation, a science-fiction story, and after that, a biopic on Sally Bauer, the first Scandinavian swimmer to cross the English Channel in 1939. As you will see in Knocking and in some of my previous films, I have a deep fascination for water.