Certificate: 15 (strong threat, violence, language, suicide). Running Time: 100 mins. UK Distributor: Universal Pictures
WHO’S IN IT?
Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Kristen Cui, Abby Quinn, Rupert Grint
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
M. Night Shyamalan (director, writer, producer), Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman (writers), Marc Bienstock and Ashwin Rajan (producers), Herdís Stefánsdóttir (composer), Jarin Blaschke and Lowell A. Meyer (cinematographers), Noemi Katharina Preiswerk (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A group of mysterious home invaders inflict an impossible choice onto their captives…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON KNOCK AT THE CABIN?
To slightly paraphrase Forrest Gump, life is like an M. Night Shyamalan film: you never know what you’re going to get. Sure, the filmmaker hit big early on in his career with hits like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, but then for a while, critical and financial flops such as Lady in the Water, The Happening, After Earth, and most notoriously The Last Airbender turned him into a punchline. However, he’s lately been giving a mix of both good and bad, if the divided reactions to The Visit, Split, Glass and Old are anything to go by, so now whenever he puts something out it’s uncertain whether we’ll get the kind of Shyamalan that genuinely catches us off guard, or the kind that is an unintentional laughter riot.
Luckily, his newest film Knock at the Cabin is much more of the former than the latter, and while parts of it are certainly in keeping with a lot of the tropes one often associates with Shyamalan, it’s certainly the most effective that he’s been in years.
The film doesn’t waste time in kicking off its central plot, which begins pretty much as soon as the opening credits are finished: a small family, including two dads Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui), is spending a nice holiday at a secluded countryside cabin, when they are suddenly paid a visit by a group of home invaders: Leonard (Dave Bautista), Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane (Abby Quinn) and Redford (Rupert Grint). They have descended upon this family because they believe that the apocalypse is imminent, and that the only way to stop it is if one member of the family decides to willingly sacrifice themselves. If they fail to make a choice, the family are told, then countless people around the world will die in a series of natural disasters, and they will be among the very last humans left.
It’s a refreshingly straightforward premise for Shyamalan – it doesn’t even have one of his trademark twists – which allows him to focus a lot more on fundamental things like characters and themes rather than get too caught up in its own convoluted plotting, a trait that has sunk a number of his films in the past. Knock at the Cabin, which Shyamalan adapts from Paul G. Tremblay’s better-titled novel The Cabin at the End of the World (rewriting a previous draft by writers Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman), emphasises the emotional weight of the situation over most other things, which helps the viewer to feel just as terrified, stressed, and nervous as these characters are, even the supposedly villainous home invaders. In fact, one of Shyamalan’s key strengths here is to make you feel compassion and even sadness for the people that we’re probably not supposed to root for; when they’re talking about their own backgrounds, what they have to lose in this impending apocalypse, and what they have to do in order to get this family to make a choice, it is believable because the acting is great by just about everyone, and the writing is particularly poignant, enough to make you completely understand the horrible choices that they have to make.
Shyamalan is also effective in putting the central ideas of his film front and centre, without letting his indulgent appetite for elaborate storytelling get in the way. Outside of being a home invasion movie with an end-of-days flavour to it, Knock at the Cabin addresses a few interesting angles that always calls to question the legitimacy of these invaders’ intentions, such as dismissing news footage of major natural disasters because they’re pre-recorded, or recognising one of them as a drunk who assaulted them in a bar years prior. These seeds of doubt are cleverly planted to keep you from believing everything these invaders are saying, until the moment where it’s no longer deniable what is actually happening, at which point you do begin to get frustrated with certain members of this family for still finding ways to rationalise what is clearly beyond reasonable explanation. There are even some intriguing ways in which the film builds upon the family themselves: in a number of flashbacks (which, in one of the few gripes I have with the movie, are inserted randomly into scenes, disrupting the tension of everything that’s happening in the titular cabin), we see moments with this couple as they’re trying to awkwardly face people who can’t accept their love, and later after said bar assault one of them goes to certain lengths to regain their masculinity, but all the while retaining their connection which powers them through this latest terrifying situation.
Even with the absence of a typical Shyamalan twist, this is one of his more unpredictable outings in a while. Because you’re never entirely sure for most of it if Dave Bautista and his clan are actual prophets or crazy cultists, it’s impossible to tell who’s being truthful and who isn’t, and so you are left quite unnerved by the prospect of wherever things are going to go next. Certain things you can pick up on almost right away, especially when some of Shyamalan’s most notable traits seep their way in – including some awkward dialogue about random concepts, tight close-up shots of actors’ faces, and even a cameo from Shyamalan himself as a TV infomercial host – but for the most part, you’re left so shaken by the uncertainty of everything that by the time it reaches a simple enough conclusion, you’re so caught up in the ride of it all that it hardly matters if there are ultimately few other surprises further along.
If Shyamalan can keep making films like this, which are more focused on characters and themes rather than intricate plotting, then maybe he can avoid another lull in his career, because Knock at the Cabin feels exactly like something he would have made straight after something like Unbreakable (still, to date, his best film). While it’s not quite up to that level, it’s still a firm reminder that, for as much as we like to make fun of his style, M. Night Shyamalan can be a powerful storyteller when he wants to be.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Knock at the Cabin is an effective home invasion thriller by M. Night Shyamalan, who wisely favours character and theme over intricate plotting to bring to life one of his more unnerving, and certainly strongest, films in years.
