Knock at the Cabin
M. Night Shyamalan is a filmmaker who should probably avoid the apocalypse. Whoever could forget his global warming horror “The Happening,” where a character stops in front of a moving lawnmower, or “After Earth,” which turned a sci-fi movie with Will Smith and Jaden Smith into a box office bomb? The end of the world fascinates Shyamalan, as does the button pushing elbow twister sentimentalist moralist but it’s also what trips him up every time. His latest film “Knock at the Cabin” takes human behavior during an end times threat and uses it as the basis for a moral study that progressively hollows itself out. It’s another small work from a director whose films have been mostly large since “After Earth.”
That’s too bad about the story, because co cinematographers Jarin Blaschke (“The Lighthouse”) and Lowell A. Meyer (“Thunder Road”) give the film a rich, earthy Kodak shot sheen that turns many scenes of characters standing around in mostly the same living room into stark close up studies of pleading faces. It looks about as much like a movie as it can. And there’s enough uniform intensity in the performances to keep things going even when they’re only playing games with them; this is very clearly designed to be a striking ensemble piece, and thus promises some early intrigue that Shyamalan’s larger intent with “Knock at the Cabin” doesn’t deliver nearly enough on.
The standout performance comes from Dave Bautista, in full tatted up teddy bear mode (he wears glasses again here, this time suggesting Blade Runner 2049’s gentle giant figure inside his own grizzly physique). For all its talk about how humans choose to interact with each other, his acting is disarmingly light here sometimes literally so, considering how gently he speaks while enacting a plan filled with the unthinkable. Second-grade teacher Leonard from Chicago who has joined three other people (played by Rupert Grint, Abby Quinn, and Nikki Amuka Bird) who have also had vision-changing visions about the apocalypse. They approach a cabin in the woods with sharp weapons in hand, and they don’t want to hurt anyone inside. But they will do violence because they feel like they have to.
The family being targeted is young Wen (Kristen Cui) and her two dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge). They don’t know why it’s them but it doesn’t matter, sitting tied up in chairs before their captors with weapons drawn on them, they must decide which one of their family of three to kill to stop an impending apocalypse. They can’t kill themselves, and if they turn down their captors’ offer something really bad will happen in the cabin, and a plague will be released. The first time Eric and Andrew say no very forcefully towering tsunamis are conjured, deadly earthquakes follow soon after.
Are Leonard & co. onto something? Or is all this a coincidence? Is it manipulation? There may be nothing more powerful on this earth than belief. It can be a tool that builds communities or a weapon that destroys lives a movie like “Knock at the Cabin” should squirm around inside that bigness uncertainty of belief, instead it just sits there looking at it like, wow!
It’s as if, for the sake of both sides ism, he’s saying that QAnon devotees and people who believe the Earth is flat might be right. He’s not nudging about a divided people (like Jordan Peele’s “Us,” which echoes through the woods of this movie), but lazily stirring fear of conspiracy.
But cut back to us We know our brains are broken. We know there’s something bigger coming. We know we’re sitting through a frustrating, self-serious movie that kneels before its zealousness but also continually explains why Leonard and his friends would sow skepticism. The script carefully doles out information about each person in order to toy with coincidence and happenstance here but it stirs more than it builds. Shyamalan doesn’t have the nuance to handle this idea, as confirmed when his expected twist comes minutes before the end.
Still from “Knock at the Cabin.” Even with these sharp weapons, bizarre motivations and that whole apocalypse thing, “Knock at the Cabin” lacks one key squeamish element. Not that the movie needs gore, but for a story pitched in man’s capacity to recognize another man’s life value for “the work,” as Leonard says there just isn’t enough terror here to make it land emotionally.
And you feel it, don’t you? You feel what kind of monsters this movie is and isn’t dealing with once Shyamalan shows how these people are driven by something that forces them into awful actions while they’re sitting around waiting for them? Which is why one anticlimax after another does not create dread so much as dull surprise.
The script (co-written by Shyamalan, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman) actually does better in making us worry for the targeted family, their present-day stress almost makes up for whatever else is happening during this immediate scenario. During this present day stress, “Knock at the Cabin” cuts back and forth between the love story of Eric (played by Zachary Quinto) and Andrew (played by Sullivan Jones), and their life with adopted daughter Wen (played by Sadie Sink). Groff and Aldridge are heartbreaking as they slowly become opposites Aldridge embodies one’s tough exterior against a threatening world, while Groff gradually depicts the journey of seeing the light. Together, they show the pain of possibly making The Choice, and how Eric and Andrew don’t want to in part because of their deep love for each other. They also help provide more substance to the film’s representation of a same-sex married couple, which on one hand More of this please. But on another hand Major studio productions still have a lot more work to do.
“Knock at the Cabin” has glimmers of interest as a parable about people trying to preserve all of humanity, not just the population but also maybe even just the concept. Because that’s what this is, right? The work here is something like a promotion for empathy though as is often said about faith: It’s the messengers who need work. By trying to make a grand statement to post-lockdown theatergoing audiences about what they’re willing to believe but also how far they’re willing to go for others Shyamalan trips over himself and forgets to give them much movie.
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