Knock at the Cabin, like so many of M. Night Shyamalan’s films feels like it was conceived in a late-night dorm room session that involved copious amounts of marijuana.
“What if, like, you could stop the apocalypse, man, but you had to kill someone you loved? Would you do it?”
“Whoa.”
In fact, the script is adapted from a novel called The Cabin at the End of the World, which is apparently much more complex than the simplified and somewhat gimmicky version that ended up on the screen.
The film starts with adorable 7-year-old Wen (Kristen Cui) collecting grasshoppers in the woods. She and her parents, Daddy Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Daddy Andrew (Ben Aldridge), are vacationing in a remote cabin a few yards away.
Out of nowhere, she is approached by a hulking man (Dave Bautista), with a bald head and tattoos. Stranger danger in the extreme!
“I don’t talk to strangers,” says Wen.
But the man, whom she will find out is named Leonard, is very patient and kind. Disconcertingly so. Without a doubt, one of the best revelations of Knock at the Cabin is how good Bautista is in this role, brilliantly subverting his comic-book-villain-like appearance to play what certainly appears to be a gentle man (who could absolutely crush you like a bug if he wanted to, mind you).
Briefly, Leonard helps Wen collect grasshoppers, but then things get scary. Three more figures emerge from the woods. A gruff looking type named Redmond (Rupert Grint), a middle-aged Black woman named Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and a hippie-ish millennial from Dupont Circle named Ardiane (Abby Quinn). They are all carrying primitive-looking weapons.
Wen runs.
As the title promises, the four invaders come a-knocking. At first Eric and Andrew try barricading the door, but the unwanted guests break windows and get inside easily. In the tussle, Eric bangs his head and gets a concussion. Sabrina, who says she’s a nurse, seems genuinely concerned and tends to him. When he wakes up, he’s tied to a chair, next to his husband.
Leonard calmly explains the situation that you’ve all undoubtedly already seen in the trailer: End times is coming and there’s only one way to stop it. They have to make a choice to kill one member of their small, tightknit family. The member can’t be killed by someone else. They have to do it themselves. They longer they wait, the more people on earth will die.
Through carefully placed flashbacks, we get a sense of Andrew and Eric as people. Andrew is cynical, world-weary, and a bit quick to anger. (He was gay-bashed at a bar not too long ago and it made him even more suspicious of the world.) Eric, on the other hand, is hopeful, religious, a bit innocent. “You can pray,” Andrew teased him, as they sat in the waiting room of the orphanage where they adopted Wen.
So Andrew, of course, thinks this whole thing is ridiculous, a scam, a hoax. Eric seems more open to the possibility that it’s real—but could it just be the concussion?
I liked A Knock at the Cabin, to a point. I absolutely loved the way Andrew explained away increasingly disturbing coincidences—earthquakes and plane crashes on the TV, for example—with logic (the segments were staged; Leonard knew about them in advance). Even more cleverly, Andrew claims the four doomsayers are victims of a kind of a mass psychosis, brought on by an Internet “echo chamber.” (That does have the ring of truth.)
My biggest problem with the film comes in its third act, which I obviously won’t disclose here. Suffice it to say, a huge connection between Eric, Andrew, and one of the assailants is never fully explained. And the ending is extremely pat—simplified where ambiguity would’ve been so much more chilling and compelling. Shymalan’s films tend to rest on clever, which gets tiresome fast. So yes, I can mildly recommend A Knock at the Cabin as a slick, shallow crowd pleaser, but it feels like a wasted opportunity. I have lots more to say about the ending of the film that I can’t spoil here. Meet you in the dorm room?