Knock at the Cabin

While vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that they make an unthinkable choice in order to avert an impending apocalypse. Confused, scared and with limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe, and what to do, before all is lost.

In a nutshell, Knock At The Cabin is a disappointing and anticlimactic film.

It looks good. It has good performances. I love when Dave Bautista wears tiny glasses and speaks in soft tones. But overall, the film is too shallow and restrained. There’s some interesting ideas, which are presented in a Twilight Zone kind of way, but that also seems like the root of the film’s main problem… maybe the initial rush of infatuation with the core idea blinded writer/director M. Night Shyamalan to the fact that nothing connects, that it all lacks a point, and that ultimately, it all leads nowhere.

The film is about a young girl and her parents, who are taken hostage by four armed strangers, who then demand that the family choose which one of them will die, all in order to avert the end of the world. The problem is, as time goes on, it starts to seem like maybe the strangers aren’t crazy at all… that they might actually be right.

It’s an intriguing idea, based on a short story I’ll never bother to read now, that touches on faith, zealotry, and sacrifice, all shaded with Biblical imagery and Qanon-like conspiracy theories, and while all that is interesting, in the end, everything in this movie just kind of dissipates like smoke.

As always, there’s tons of people out there who still make the same tired old “twist’ jokes about Shyamalan, or they make a show of mispronouncing his name—which is super racist, btw, people… super fucking racist—and I get it. He’s a good film maker who has relied on the same rug-pulling trick too often. Personally, I haven’t been into his stuff for awhile now, for the same reasons why Knock At The Cabin disappointed me, but I caught an advanced screening of Split at the Secret Showing one Fantastic Fest, and while I did enjoy that film a lot, and I loooooved its follow-up Glass, it was Shyamalan’s post film Q&A that really won me over. His self-awareness, his reasons for making movies, especially mid-budget genre stuff, his inspirations and goals, it was all very refreshing and relatable. I really vibed with it. That Q&A didn’t change my mind on his work overall, of course, but now at least, I approach his new stuff more than willing to give it a chance.

But still, Knock At The Cabin just doesn’t work.

The film has a lot of the same problems that his previous film Old did… an intriguing idea that doesn’t have much going on below the surface, and the attempt to bring it all home in the end not only fails, but it’s so tediously heavy-handed it hurts everything good that preceded it.

Disappointing.