M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin adapts author Paul Tremblay’s Cabin at the End of the World, a grim novel that asks the impossible of its characters with no painless solution. The deceptive simplicity of the source material gave way to existential, moral conundrums in the face of a potential apocalypse. Shyamalan gives his spin on the story, injecting recurring themes of faith and optimism. It results in a muted, superficial rendering.
Adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) catches grasshoppers while dads Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) relax at their remote cabin in the woods. The sudden arrival of an imposing stranger, Leonard (Dave Bautista), catches Wen off guard, though his gentle demeanor disarms her. Then three more strangers, Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane (Abby Quinn), and Redmond (Rupert Grint), emerge from the woods. A terrified Wen runs back to her parents, sparking an intense home invasion that results in the strangers taking the family hostage. They task the family with an unthinkable choice; sacrifice one to save the world or doom humanity.
The adapted screenplay by Shyamalan, Steve Desmond & Michael Sherman builds initial suspense through the intense home invasion, then through ambiguity. After the tension-filled sequence that sees the family held at the mercy of the weapon-wielding foursome, Shyamalan seamlessly slides into a psychological back and forth between biblical doom and scientific reason. Eric and Andrew are reluctant to buy into the foursome’s shared prophecies and visions of doom. Instead, they toggle between questions of sanity, random acts of violence, or hate crimes. It’s when Shyamalan revels in the uncertainty that his latest is at its strongest.
The cast is more than up to relaying the high personal stakes. Groff and Aldridge convey an extensive history between their characters and a depth of unwavering love. Cui is also instantly winsome as the precocious Wen, but Bautista stands out the most as the gentle giant Leonard. Despite his hulking frame, Leonard injects the most pathos into the foursome’s machinations. Bautista brings gravitas and empathy to an archetypical role that often leads with brute force. Leonard is the opposite; his cooler head continually seeks to diffuse the violence.
It’s not just Leonard that gets a bit squeamish about violence, but Shyamalan, too. The filmmaker prefers to cut away or frame deaths off-screen, a move that winds up minimizing the impact of the stakes when the film rarely leaves the cabin or its handful of characters. This becomes a fatal flaw in the third act when Shyamalan makes a drastic departure from the source material in favor of a definitive faith-based stance meant to inject hope and optimism. Instead, it robs the narrative of a climax. Knock at the Cabin squanders its pent-up tension with a quiet fizzle and a pat on the back. All the heady questions posited at the outset get waved off with an easy shrug.
Knock at the Cabin once again puts Shyamalan’s penchant for emotional journeys centered around faith and the family unit on display, along with his stellar craftsmanship and composition. But in doing so here, he robs the story of its thematic heaviness in favor of trite optimism that conflicts with the initial setup. What’s at stake never feels more than personal; despite the modern-day biblical tale, the scale never becomes as massive as it should. The cast gives it their all, but Shyamalan takes the easy way out of a story meant to challenge notions and beliefs. It yields a quickly paced but single-note and ineffectual apocalyptic tale.
Knock at the Cabin releases in theaters on February 3, 2023.
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