Movie Review: Knock At The Cabin

New Film From Writer-Director M. Night Shyamalan is Powerful Genre Storytelling

Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has taken a beating from critics over the years. If his body of work is being referred to politely, it’s labeled as “hit or miss” or “uneven”. It’s not an unfair characterization, but it also applies to the vast majority of filmmakers who’ve managed to survive in Hollywood for thirty years.

So why has Shyamalan been such a magnet for outright vitriol from fans and critics alike? Perhaps it’s because the hits (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs) are so so good and the misses are so so bad (Lady in the Water, The Happening After Earth). Home run or strikeout. Feast or famine. It’s the lasting curse of having a huge box office and critical success before the age of 30. If you’re capable of greatness, then it’s expected every time out of the gate. You’re the child prodigy from whom much is expected.

Shyamalan’s latest, Knock at the Cabin, is a strong genre film if movies about the possible coming of the apocalypse are your cup of tea. While the subject matter is horrifying, it’s not a horror film. It’s disquieting, disturbing even, but its goal is not to frighten you. Knock at the Cabin takes big existential questions about the plight of humanity and the nature of sacrifice in an increasingly selfish, skeptical world and wraps them up inside a well-made thriller.

As the film opens, Wen (Kristen Cui) is spending time at a quaint cabin in the woods with her two dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge). While Wen is catching grasshoppers in a jar, she encounters Leonard (Dave Bautista), a large tattooed man who should scare Wen but instead manages to build a rapport with her. Wen informs Leonard that she’s not supposed to talk to strangers. He acknowledges that’s a good policy before launching into a discussion about the proper techniques for adding to her grasshopper collection.

When Leonard’s three companions emerge from the woods bearing what appear to be weapons, Wen’s survival instincts kick in. She races back to the cabin to warn her two dads who find themselves confronting the very real possibility of defending against a home invasion in the middle of nowhere. Their telephones don’t work, and the family gun is safely locked away in a location where it’s of little use.

After the dust settles, the four intruders make it clear they won’t harm Wen and her parents. The visions collectively plaguing them for years are coming true, and they must present an ultimatum to the family of three. The end of the world is at hand, and the only way to save all of humanity is for Eric, Andrew and Wen to make a blood sacrifice. One of the three must kill another member of their small family. It can’t be suicide. It must be a sacrifice of one by another. If the sacrifice is not made, the world as we know it will cease to exist.

The white noise and confusion created by this seemingly random threat is deafening for the two men. They entertain the idea that they’re being targeted because they’re a same-sex couple. They’re wrong, but years of bigoted comments, judgmental looks and outright violence justify their suspiciousness. In our modern world of mass shootings and mental illness, the thought of a doomsday cult with murderous intent isn’t far-fetched, but the intruders have pledged not to harm them. In fact Eric and Andrew are being politely asked to choose who they themselves wish to sacrifice for “the greater good”.

On one level Knock at the Cabin is a crafty cat-and-mouse thriller where three hostages who are too valuable to be killed by their captors attempt to escape from a deadly situation. On a metaphorical level, the film examines the nature of faith, the limits of doubt and our belief or disbelief in a life beyond our physical existence here on Earth. What emerges from this narrative pressure cooker is a portrait of a family who loves each other dearly, giving the film the emotional stakes needed for an audience to genuinely invest in its outcome. I didn’t attend an M. Night Shyamalan film expecting to see a moving love story and yet that’s precisely what I found.

The entire cast is solid and grounds a potentially silly story with a sense of earnestness. If you think Dave Bautista can only serve up physical action as Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy films, you are mistaken. His brief, but excellent work, in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is a good tonal comparison to his work here. His quiet sincere performance as Leonard, the leader of the doomsday visionaries, is essential to the success of the film. The impending end of the world is not a threat from Leonard. It is a certainty. It simply is. Only Eric, Andrew and Wen can avert disaster for all of humanity. Leonard is not the threat; he’s simply the messenger.

Shyamalan has always been a master visual stylist. Knock takes place almost entirely inside the titular cabin. Despite those presumed limitations on cinematography, the director’s effortless use of focus pulling, extreme close-ups and diopter shifts gives the film a surreal visual vocabulary that accentuates the otherworldly story unfolding on screen. (If you haven’t seen Servant, Shyamalan’s brilliant television series on Apple TV+, you’ve missed a master class in creating compelling visuals in a cramped space.)

Knock at the Cabin is not a home run nor is it a strike out. It may not be a runaway hit, but it is in no way a miss. It’s a solid genre film that falls somewhere between those extremes. The internet loves its lists: the best this or the worst that. Whatever happened to something simply being “good” or “bad”? There’s nothing wrong with good. And there’s nothing wrong with spending a hundred minutes watching Knock at the Cabin.