Toc Toc (2017)

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Toc Toc is a gratuitous case of basic commercialism—opportunity-within-opportunity, an obscene and un-self-conscious window, starting off poking and shaking treetops frantically with its yardstick. However, I am betrayed early on, in that even as its sweat and wrenching mettle traduce its humour, it goes swinging and jumping like it would be charged with sportsmanship, pure ease, all the while doing Dialectics like this were a Gaian sack of self-proliferating, Fabergé coconuts—hairy but true, copious and veracious.

Toc Toc, I charge, is nothing but a Bronze Calf, a bootleg totem, revived from somewhere far, far back in the chain of determination, caught embezzling aggressive psyche yet again. It quickly sinks from healthy Family time into miasmatic board game time, ripping idiosyncrasies from important hands (and showing like the Self equals bad hands without knowing how to say it), even striving to pull together the heady companionship of Biblicism using self-evidently implausible theatricality, which is a bit like miffing the leader.

Toc Toc tries but fails to convince the viewer that clients find loss of boundary sorely missed, propounding its cheap hypnotism that deep interest and social jab must, writ, become superego. Honestly, mental cinema of its kind is, very often, responsible for bad cases of recursion, for indoctrinating an outright epidemiology of cheating solipsism, for mistakenly presuming line of perception plus cathected phraseology does not equal magnitudinous psychoeducation. And in the same way the film characterizes aggression, it creates characters just to keep this involved, and then condemns its gimmick from public to private, from circulation to storage, in an artless, dubious haste. It shows itself to be post-Oedipal, pulling, not straining, muscles, shrinking too far down into the couch of fear, and to be completely equivocal about group and individual ego, which is arguably the path of most resistance to self-collected mastery.