One of those memes that somehow continues to circulate through Twitter every few months asks which kind of horror scares you the most. I was thinking about that meme a lot while watching Frida Kempff’s exquisitely directed Knocking (Knackningar) because, ultimately, I don’t think there’s anything worse in horror than not being believed. The idea that you know something is happening and no one will listen to you--or worse...they’ll call you crazy--is terrifying and real. Recently, this feeling in horror and the dread it can create feels particularly pertinent in a world where “Fact” and “Truth” are often decided by who’s shouting the loudest and who has the power.

Molly (Cecilia Milocco) certainly doesn’t have the power or the voice in this messy horror film that creates an unsettling vibe but doesn’t quite the land the ending.

Knocking opens with a fantastic overhead shot of a bright and beautiful beach. At the top of the screen, the ocean slowly pulls in and retreats while sunbathers, including Molly and her lover Judith (Charlotta Åkerblom), lounge towards the bottom of the screen, bathed in gorgeous rays. As Judith kisses Molly’s shoulder and gets up to leave, the light changes and Molly awakens on a bench in a hospital where she’s being treated for a traumatic event. We’re not told much, except that Molly has been in this hospital for approximately a year. Her faceless doctor asks how she’s doing and says he’s in awe of her progress, considering “...everything you’ve been through,” but tells her it's time for Molly to enter back into society.

At her new apartment building, things begin on an ominous note as she discovers the word “HELP” written in red in the elevator. Her apartment, meanwhile, is cramped and bathed in shadows. Molly begins to settle in but that night there’s a very loud and persistent knocking noise coming from the floor above her. The knocking is incessant and obnoxious and while it has a rhythmic edge to it, it sounds like it’s being made by a person.

As Molly becomes first disgruntled at the nightly noises and then concerned, she meets her upstairs neighbors, but none of them seem to hear it and all of them write her off as a crazy woman. Soon, she becomes convinced that at least one of her neighbors is involved somehow. Is it Morse code? Is it someone in danger? Is her vaguely creepy upstairs neighbor Kaj (Ville Virtanen) keeping someone trapped in his apartment?

When she hears a woman’s cries echoing through the pipes…and Molly knows she must do something. Even if no one believes her.

Frida Kempff and cinematographer Hannes Krantz create an unsettling world by focusing on the interplay of light and darkness with intense close-ups. The opening scene shows Molly bathed in the sun while she’s on the beach, but the rest of the film is a sharp departure from that aesthetic. Gone are the naturalist settings that implied warmth, replaced with industrial buildings, claustrophobic hallways and a sense of urban decay. Where she once lived in the light, she now pulls the blinds shut, secreted away from the outside world.

Knocking works best when it focuses on this sense of mood and atmosphere, using small moments of quiet horror to really keep the viewer on edge. At one point, as Molly hurries through a dark tunnel, she accidentally steps on the decaying body of a dead frog, its innards squished out. Cinematographer Hannes Krantz focuses on this image before quickly transitioning to Molly holding a piece of fruit between her fingers, squeezing its own red innards out of its ruptured body.

It’s one of the many ways Hannes Krantz keeps the viewer unsettled. Cecilia is a revelation as Molly and Hannes Krantz smartly shoots most of the film with her expressive face in frame. It creates a sense of intimacy and claustrophobia that is sold with each emotive glance and frustrated movement Molly goes through. She brings a sense of world-weariness and life to her character and grounds the narrative. Meanwhile, the narrative by Emma Broström (from a novel by Johan Theorin) is quietly refreshing because it presents a queer character in horror, but the horror doesn’ come from her queerness. It’s used as just another facet of her character while subtly adding an additional sense of “otherness” to Molly, who spends most of her time on the outside looking in.

Unfortunately, while the first two acts masterfully build the horror with sequences of quiet tension, the third act falters as it tries to wrap everything up in a semi-neat bow. The majority of the film trades in themes of paranoia, confusion and mental illness. Molly will see things that aren’t there or misremember events as if stuck in a kind of loop. She’s obviously still struggling and the narrative does a fantastic job of presenting a character who’s not given the support she needs. But the central mystery muddles the narrative and themes so as the third act attempts to pull everything together, it begins to fray at the seams. For a film that was so keenly focused on conjuring a mood and feeling, the afterthought of a resolution left me not focused on how Knocking made me feel for its brief runtime, but on the little details that didn’t quite add up.

Sitting at 74 minutes, it’s a rare time where I wish the film were a bit longer so that the themes and narrative had a little more time to breathe. Towards the beginning of Knocking, Molly stands on her balcony and looks at the boxy apartment building across from her. A little bird chirps and tries to land on the round deck railing, but the railing is too wide and round and the poor bird can’t find purchase. Its legs keep sliding out from under it, but still it tries to hold on. It’s a subtle and powerful metaphor.

Molly is that bird, trying to find steady ground to start her new life but not being able to find purchase. But so is Knocking, a film that has some fantastic ideas but never quite finds its footing. Ultimately, Knocking mixes fantastic imagery and moments of slow-burn tension but is hampered by a script that could have used a bit more polishing.