Knock at the Cabin (2023)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Its premise is, by now, familiar enough to us all: A young gay couple, on vacation with their adopted daughter, find themselves approached and assaulted by four mysterious strangers who claim that the apocalypse is nearing and can only be averted if the family decides to sacrifice one of their own. Intriguing, to be sure, and certainly the kind of thing that would attract a filmmaker like M. Night Shyamalan. He's made several films previously about the end of the world and various forms of invasion to that end, though more often than not he's hamstrung himself in the execution of his ideas by a certain tendency for moralizing. In these ways, I'd call Knock at the Cabin a true Shyamalan film from top to bottom, which is to say very much in the vein of his best work while occasionally, annoyingly, sentimental. 

Adapted by the novel The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, this film is unusual for not being Shyamalan's own original idea. I think that has helped him here, as a director, be more creative in other aspects of directing, namely in his approach to the material and in his work with the cast. Here, his actors are uniformly excellent, terrifyingly intense for the entire movie, led by Dave Bautista in his best performance yet. He plays Leonard, the leader of the "four horsemen" who were strangers and approach the cabin almost with confusion after being unable to stay away or endure horrific visions of death and destruction. Along with the other horsemen -- played by Abby Quinn, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Rupert Grint -- they come armed with weapons but say they don't want to use them. Bautista is completely disarming despite his hulking physical presence, and both his voice and movement work, while totally believable, are fiercely calculated to disturb our expectations of his character.

Their assault on the house is brief but fierce, and it doesn't take long for them to tie up the dads and sit them down to hear what's about to happen. Think of the end sequence of The Strangers but with quasi-religious urgency and stretched out to about an hour. It's a chilling scene, one that takes place during the bulk of the movie, albeit in different iterations. The family in peril includes young Wen (Kristen Cui) and her two dads, Eric and Andrew (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge), who battle both their forced confinement and the ideas of impending doom. Of course they can't sacrifice one of their own for these violent invaders, right? Do they even believe that it's really the end of the world, or are they just being targeted for a hate crime?

A series of weird turns start to shake their certainty. At appointed times, the invaders must shed blood to forestall the inevitable, so they periodically kill each other in ritualistic fashion. Each time, the murder happens just before something bad in the news, such as a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami. But there are a lot of suspicious holes in what they say and how they say it. Some of the news updates are recycled from hours earlier, some couldn't be breaking news, and even the intruders themselves aren't exactly being honest about who they all are. The seeds of doubt take root quickly, and soon Eric and Andrew find themselves internally battling their own misgivings. Shyamalan shines here, making yet another movie we might loosely qualify as "faith horror," something just shy of existential horror in that it maintains a firm grip on traditional morality while treacherously muddying the waters.

I was also fascinated to see that Shyamalan utilizes two cinematographers rather than one -- Jarin Blaschke (who usually does beautiful work for Robert Eggers) and Lowell A. Meyer (who I don't know of at all) -- who together make this film a stunning treat for the eyes. Beautifully rendered in saturated colors of rich and earthy tones, all on real film, the movie focuses on its characters in mostly close-up, creating an intimate and tactile experience for us that never quite feels claustrophobic. What they, surely via Shyamalan's direction, fail to do is satisfy the film's constant threat of violence and gore. Shyamalan notoriously sidesteps gore to make his movies more psychological and more PG-13, but Tremblay's book is dripping with graphic violence and I for one think that is kind of appropriate to the material, especially with Shyamalan's clear intent to lean into the religiosity of sacrifice and salvation.

It's all just a bit anticlimactic, especially in the denouement, which is changed significantly from the novel. SPOILER ALERT about the ending, because we've gotta go there. While I appreciate that the death of a child is not ideal entertainment or for any kind of viewing, the filmmakers' decision for Eric to commit suicide and for Wen to not (accidentally) die was exactly the kind of sentimental crap I think Tremblay was trying to avoid in his novel. Sometimes the love between two people does matter more than any philosophical debate about the "greater good," especially when that greater good is thrown into much doubt. Shyamalan also changes -- a far worse sin, in my mind -- the nature of the secondary threat, making it extremely visually clear that the end of the world is indeed approaching. The novel ends with that being very ambiguous, but as the surviving characters depart the cabin in the film, the sky has grown dark and planes are dropping and it's just all too obvious. Ambiguity would have served the horror better here, much like the end of Hitchcock's The Birds.