Rating: R | Runtime: 82 minutes
Release Date: August 15th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Relativity Media / Inaugural Entertainment
Director(s): Nnamdi Asomugha
Writer(s): Mark Duplass & Nnamdi Asomugha

The truth here is everything.

Fear is a funny thing. When confronting a bad situation, the impulse is to try and make things look better. Why? Because the truth is funny too. Depending on the circumstances, what actually happened can often seem less likely than what probably happened. And if the evidence points to the latter, the former becomes moot. So, now you must consider whether that fear is helping or hurting since its emotional toll also possesses the potential to cloud judgment. What if an impulsive act meant to direct attention towards the truth unwittingly negates it instead. If you can’t trust the smoking gun, how can you trust anything?

Everything within director Nnamdi Asomugha and co-writer Mark Duplass’s script is intentional. Race. The neighborhood’s reputation. The time of night. The form of pain relief. The Knife of the title is conversely a distraction. It’s the catalyst forcing Detective Carlsen (Melissa Leo) and Officer Padilla (Manny Jacinto) to question what Chris (Asomugha) and Alex (Aja Naomi King) are saying and subsequently hypothesize how all those other pieces fit their puzzle. Because the moment that knife’s credibility gets destroyed is the moment it stops being a bolster for the truth and starts becoming proof that the truth is actually a lie.

Don’t therefore dismiss anything that occurs. For example: it’s easy to brush aside Carlsen’s comment to Alex about never being able to afford a house like this at her age as an icebreaker. We’ve been told the property is cheaper than their old apartment’s rent because the neighborhood is a bit sketchy, so we know Carlsen probably could have afforded it if made aware of those details. Does it matter? No. It’s just small talk to create a rapport and cut through the obvious power imbalance. Unless … it’s not a joke at all. Maybe it’s Carlsen talking through her prejudicial thought process to figure out how they can afford it.

The Knife surely rewards repeat viewings as a result because we are purposefully putting all our attention upon that weapon. Why Alex did what she did with it. Whether Chris’s recollection of leaving it on the kitchen counter when attempting to confront the intruder in his home (Lucinda Jenney) will set off a lightbulb as far as explaining how it got in her hand. How one of their children (Amari Alexis Price’s Kendra and Aiden Gabrielle Price’s Ryler) will surely let slip what they saw right before the police arrived. They’re all so desperate to corroborate one lie that they don’t see how it recontextualizes everything.

I’ll admit I didn’t see it either. You become so invested in the obvious dramatic through line that you see the rest as a byproduct of it. All that tension? It’s just because of the knife. Separating everyone for individual interrogations? It’s to get to the bottom of the lie we witnessed being committed. The sheer fact we know something is amiss with the family intrinsically allows us to presume we can trust the other side of the equation is solely focused on discovering it too. So, we forget why Alex was so afraid in the first place. Because it’s not about one lie. It’s about how that one lie can be used to confirm other unethically sourced suspicions.

So, don’t leave your seat when the film cuts to black. The real “a-ha” moment doesn’t arrive until the credits present a dispatcher’s voice. That’s when we remember the violence of a cop’s smile is sometimes as hateful as the violence of their drawn gun. Because the initial consequences of this night make sense. Maybe they’re unjustly harsh considering the context we’re provided, but you cannot deny more than one crime was committed. But the choice to move that knife isn’t the only faulty leap of logic that occurs either. And the ones we don’t consider until that dispatcher speaks are a whole lot more destructive.

It’s why this story is told from the family’s perspective. It’s not about Carlsen figuring out the truth. It’s about Chris and Alex letting fear drive their actions to a point where they create the circumstantial evidence needed to disprove the truth. There’s no more damning look into the dangers of American systemic racism than a scenario where the victims of that cruelty are so aware of it that their attempts to survive seal a worse fate. It allows Leo’s earnestly honest cop to unwittingly become a predator by doing her job and Asomugha and King to become criminals by trying to prove their innocence. The game is rigged.

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Melissa Leo, Amari Price, Aja Naomi King, Nnamdi Asomugha, and Aiden Price in THE KNIFE; courtesy of iAm21 Entertainment.