The Pitch: Happy-go-lucky dads (and, since this is an M. Night Shyamalan film, proud Pennsylvanians) Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) take their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) up to a remote cabin in the New Jersey Pine Barrens for some quality daddies-daughter time. For a while, it’s all catching grasshoppers and impromptu dives into the crystal-clear lake nearby… until a mysterious man named Leonard (Dave Bautista) shows up, gentle as a butterfly but honed by a terrifying purpose.
You see, he and his three compatriots — Adriane (Abby Quinn), Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and Redmond (Rupert Grint) — have never met in person before today, but they’re driven by a shared vision of the apocalypse. And they’re convinced that, unless a member of Eric and Andrew’s family willingly sacrifices themselves, humanity will be beset by plague, pestilence, and annihilation.
Are they crazy people driven by a shared delusion? Or are their visions truly prophetic? And if so, do their targets have the ability to do what they feel needs to be done?
Signs and Portents: It’s a wild time to be an M. Night Shyamalan fan; after a string of successes in the late ’90s with films like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, public sentiment turned on his works with a string of flops ranging from absurd overextensions of his high-concept thriller predilections (The Happening) to downright baffling adaptations of material he had no business touching (The Last Airbender).
But in recent years, it seems that both Shyamalan and his audience have found a way to meet each other halfway: his works are smaller, more high-concept, and play to his strengths — Split was a wonderful return to form, and a dedicated cabal of film fans had a wild ride with Old. Knock at the Cabin feels very much in his wheelhouse, a lo-fi thriller restricted largely to a single location, extending the personal stakes of a family dynamic out to the end of the world (see his excellent Apple TV+ series Servant for more of the same — and more Grint!).
Based on the novel by Paul Tremblay, Knock at the Cabin commits to its thought experiment of a premise, a deadly dilemma that no one involved wants to participate in, but seemingly must. Leonard and his group of zealots carry themselves with the conviction of the righteous, but what stirs in their performances is that ongoing tinge of resignation. They’re hardly the most terrifying home invaders, Bautista’s imposing size aside: they’re grade-school teachers, line cooks, nurses — everyday folks nonetheless burdened with visions of the end of the world they feel only they can stop. If they didn’t think the literal world was about to end, they’d be anywhere else.
Knock at the Cabin (Universal Pictures)
It’s a fundamental tension Shyamalan mines for maximum effect, especially when making use of Bautista, one of our most interesting wrestlers-cum-actors to date. As Blade Runner 2049 taught us, never underestimate a performance where Big Dave wears little glasses, and Leonard is no exception: Bautista tempers his immense bulk with slumped, apologetic shoulders, his every practiced word spoken in a gentle murmur.
He’s our antagonist, but he’s not a yelling, intimidating brute: in a perfect world, he’d be an incredible role model for young Wen. It’s this dissonance between these attackers’ altruistic motivations and the agonizing choice they must make someone else make that makes them so interesting. And thanks to The Lighthouse cinematographer Jarin Blaschke (who clearly took notes from Shyamalan’s previous work with Robert Gioulakis), these discussions play out in one intriguingly-framed close-up after another.
Always Together: Granted, like a lot of Shyamalan’s films, it rides on its premise and craft more than its characters. Eric, Andrew, and Wen are largely mere sketches, the platonic example of a happy, assimilated gay family; we get intermittent flashbacks to important milestones in their family’s life, whether it’s Eric and Andrew reasserting their love in the face of a world that hates and rejects them, or the moment they first adopt Wen and their family feels complete.
Groff offers just enough gentility and vulnerability to make his half of the load work, but it’s Aldridge who impresses most here — a gay man who converts his fear of homophobic violence into a life of fitness, self-defense, and gun ownership.
It translates into his response to Leonard et al.’s apocalyptic proposal: Andrew loudly and vociferously looks for any and all ways to poke holes in their story, whether discounting early signs of Armageddon as pre-recorded news reports to interrogating the links between their four captors. He’s a die-hard believer too, but his belief is in atheistic rationality and love for his family. Seeing his ardor clash with that of his attackers makes for compelling, electric stuff.
The Verdict: Readers of the novel may balk at some of the changes Shyamalan and co-screenwriters Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman make to the source material (their script takes a very different approach to the ending). But these changes feel part and parcel of Shyamalan’s concerns as an artist and filmmaker. In a lot of ways, this film in particular feels like the close of a loose trilogy of films (starting with Signs and continuing with The Happening) about the strength of our beliefs and the love for our family, and whether those two things can help us through existentially damning times.
Knock at the Cabin explores these ideas on a much smaller scale, taking audiences through the psychological wringer and ending on the most bittersweet of bittersweet notes. It’s not up there with his best, but it’s a solid thriller that traps you in the middle of an impossible question and leaves you, like its characters, to figure out the answer.
Where’s It Playing? Knock at the Cabin shows up in theaters and asks you to make an impossible choice on February 3rd.
Trailer:
