Though he’s been a fixture in the horror genre since almost the beginning of his career, M. Night Shyamalan has never been particularly interested in gore (bone-crunching effects in Old aside). Knock at the Cabin is the rare R-rated horror movie with little on-screen violence and blood. Instead, the movie smartly leaves the worst of its terrors up to the imagination, a powerful choice in an unnerving film that questions faith in things we cannot see or cannot know for sure.
With the exception of flashbacks, Knock at the Cabin is set almost exclusively in an isolated vacation home. Daddy Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Daddy Eric (Jonathan Groff) have traveled there with their daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) for some peace, quiet, and time off the grid; the cable TV soon becomes their only connection to the outside world. Yet while the loving family is there to relax, the film itself wastes no time getting to the action. Mere minutes after the sinister opening credits, the idyllic retreat is interrupted, and Knock at the Cabin kicks into gear, refusing to let up for its tight 100 minutes.
Young Wen is trapping grasshoppers in the woods when a hulking stranger (Dave Bautista) approaches. The mere appearance of another person in the remote forest is a menace, amplified further by Bautista’s stature. He’s weirdly calm and soft-spoken, but he’s not alone. Soon, a trio (Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rupert Grint, and Abby Quinn) joins him, and they desperately want inside the house. They claim they only want to talk to Daddy Andrew, Daddy Eric, and Wen, while wielding makeshift but utterly terrifying weapons.
With an equally spare setting, premise, and cast, writing about Knock at the Cabin means talking around its basic story and central ideas, for fear of spoiling the mystery here that makes it an M. Night Shyamalan Film™. While this thriller is quite bleak for a studio movie, it has an exhilarating quality even beyond its taut suspense. A nervous streak of gallows humor courses through the script from Shyamalan, Steve Desmond, and Michael Sherman, and Cui’s Wen is truly adorable without ever descending into sitcom levels of over-the-top cuteness while she’s in real danger.
However, most of the pleasures of Knock at the Cabin arrive from two sources: Shyamalan’s masterful filmmaking and Bautista’s nuanced performance. The director keeps the audience wound tight, leaving them as much in the dark as Andrew, Eric, and Wen as to what’s really going on in both the cabin and the world outside. Together Shyamalan and DPs Jarin Blaschke and Lowell A. Meyer make such interesting, unexpected choices in the cinematography, offering a bounty of tight closeups and over-the-shoulder shots set to Herdís Stefánsdóttir’s chilling score. We’re literally not getting the full picture, but what we do see is gorgeous. Knock at the Cabin simply doesn’t look like most other movies being released right now.
Those tight closeups are where Bautista astounds. It would be easy for both the actor and Shyamalan to rely on the shortcut of his imposing physicality, but the director intentionally removes that cheat. Everything has to be expressed through Bautista’s face, and each minute expression communicates his character’s struggle with what he believes he has to do.
Knock at the Cabin is the director’s closest engagement with the concept of faith since Signs, and it echoes that film’s emphasis on the importance of familial bonds, especially in a crisis. The only real respites from the suspense here are found in the flashbacks that focus on the powerful connection between these three people. A few years ago, its insistence on the value of the romantic love between these two men and their paternal love for their adopted daughter might have felt unnecessary, but the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights recently have demonstrated that this fight is still regrettably relevant.
Knock at the Cabin poses serious questions about destiny and delusion and conspiracies and coincidences, but it doesn’t offer many concrete or thoughtful answers. It’s more conclusive than its source material, Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World, but it still doesn’t offer the clarity of either what’s really happening or what it thinks about its big themes. There are plenty of surprises here, both for those who’ve read the book and those who go in cold. Shyamalan and his co-writers aren’t too precious with following Tremblay’s plot, and their choices are likely to make the film more palatable to audiences while remaining pretty grim. However, the script suffers from the standard silliness of Shyamalan films, with some moments falling apart like ash the moment they’re touched by the lightest logic.
In its climax, Knock at the Cabin doesn’t fully land the gut punch it’s attempting, but it does still knock the wind out of you with its boldness. Even more so than the delightfully daffy Old, his latest movie serves as a reminder of why he’s one of Hollywood’s most recognizable directors — and not just because of his inevitable cameo. Knock at the Cabin is thrilling work that keeps the audience enthralled by Shyamalan’s signature approach to the medium.
“Knock at the Cabin” is in theaters today.
B
