Knock Knock. Who’s There?
Main Cast: Brittany Dunk, Jason Scarbrough
Director: Isaac Rodriguez
There were a few things that initially drew me to UNKNOWN VISITOR. It’s found footage, which I’m always up for. It’s found footage as seen through a Ring camera or some unnamed version thereof, which is an interesting way to shoot your movie. And it’s only 53 minutes long, which means I can watch a movie and still have plenty of day left to do other things, like watch more movies.
Now let’s look at the cons. Everything else.
Annie (Brittany Dunk) is a woman who lives alone. Annie is also a woman who previously suffered a psychotic break and is supposed to be taking medication. Annie has a friend, Jeff (Jason Scarbrough), who is probably in love with her, and is doing whatever he can to get out of the friend zone, even if that means helping Annie install her doorbell camera. And by helping, I mean doing it for her because for the entire length of this “movie”, Annie seems pretty damn useless at doing anything by herself.
So when a strange woman (June Griffin Garcia) starts to show up on Annie’s camera, first smearing feces all over the porch, and then later coming to the door and asking for help, Annie’s only response is to call Jeff. Jeff comes over and things go downhill from there.
UNKNOWN VISITOR has a very small cast, only three people, and only one location, Annie’s front porch, and only one camera set-up, POV of the doorbell camera. This is budget filmmaking at its budgetiest for sure.
But is it worth the 53 minutes?
I don’t know. It feels like there’s more story here than we’re getting, and I kind of wish there’d been more time to explore the stuff we’re only getting hints of. Like did Annie REALLY have a psychotic break? Because there are details revealed late in the game that bring that into question and could then make a person with more time on their hands than I have go back for a second viewing, looking for clues.
This one is written and directed by Isaac Rodriguez, who would go on to do DEADWARE and LAST RADIO CALL (which featured both Scarbrough and Garcia), two more found footage movies that use different methods of telling their stories (webchat for one, body cam footage for the other), but neither of which really did much to advance the genre. Rodriguez feels like a filmmaker who loves the work and the genre, but just hasn’t found that ONE story yet that really says what he’s trying to say. So he keeps making movies like this that ALMOST get there, but not quite.
But UNKNOWN VISITOR is less than an hour out of my day and I can add it to the general list of movies I’ve watched. At the end of the day, it was an Amazon Prime movie so I’m not out any money, and I’m not mad I watched it.
Read more horror reviews at Horror Corner
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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