KNOCK AT THE CABIN
2023
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Written by Steve Desmond, Michael Sherman, and M. Night Shyamalan (based on the novel The Cabin At the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay)
That it's based on a 2018 horror novel, Paul G. Tremblay's The Cabin At the End of the World—and that it finds screenwriting duties offloaded onto two more pairs of shoulders, such an unusual case for this director that it's only happened once before in his entire filmography, with After Earth—should probably make the claim I'm about to make for M. Night Shyamalan's Knock At the Cabin more complicated than such a summary statement justifies. But if you consider that at least one of those three writers, and I would have to assume that the co-writer who directed and produced it carried the most weight, decided that Tremblay's book needed not only a title change (a very bad change the more you think about it; you don't get a "knock at the house" or "knock at the hotel," now do you?) but that it would be better if its ending were the exact opposite of what Tremblay wrote, then it might even reinforce it. That claim, anyway, is that it's basically a fully self-aware remake of the last more-or-less beloved hit of the promethean first phase of Shyamalan's career, Signs. Or, rather—because let's be fair here—a variation upon its themes. Oh, we can be fairer than that: it's the version of Signs that's any fucking good.
I have, I expect, made it clear over the years how much I dislike Signs, so sorry if you actually enjoy it. I hate it, and while it gets unforgettably terrible when it lays its Shyamalan tweest on you, it's largely awful long before that, ill-conceived from about every angle it could be considered from, but of course principally in regards to its water-averse alien commandos who turn out to be extremely invested in the conquest of a single Pennyslvania farmhouse. Cabin, though, is from an older and wiser Shyamalan, who'd just proven (to me, anyway) that he still had the chops by making Old, and, fortunately, most of the objections to the really stupid concepts that pertained to Signs don't pertain here; meanwhile, the absence of any twist, even an obligatory one, is almost a twist itself, either from this filmmaker or for this scenario. Instead Cabin runs fatalistically through its straightforward epistemological thought experiment, though never forgetting to have some grim fun along the way; it's a rather tight affair, and consistent—not things to necessarily expect from the Shyamalan of any era—though I'll confess, I like it less than Old, which is way messier but in the midst of that could be delightful in its savage surprises. (And, I'd offer, is just a much brawnier piece of cinema, arguably as interested in showing off Shyamalan's technical capabilities as any film he's ever made.)
But I was speaking of Signs, and, anyway, I don't hate the very basic narrative ingredients of Signs, namely the isolated location (and Cabin doubles down on that to the point the movie practically exists solely in one single room); the family unit in peril from implacable and rather inexplicable adversaries, with a few choice glimpses of the apocalyptic scale of the threat those adversaries represent; and an ending designed to restore a man's faith, albeit this time his faith in humanity and goodness, rather than, specifically, God. Tremblay's novel, to my understanding, ends with him saying "fuck that." Certainly, it's possible the novel is different enough to justify this—however, given that in almost every other respect, Knock At the Cabin seems to almost-slavishly replicate The Cabin At the End of the World's plot, it wouldn't be my guess—but I'll say that it looks like Shyamalan made the right call with this one, especially when the angry nihilism that sneaks around our "hero" (if that's what you'd like to call him) comes packaged in the movie's single least appealing character. That's true, even though this movie is about how he attempts to fend off a suicide cult.
So: in Pennsylvania—but of course, hi Night, you jag—married couple Andrew (Ben Aldrige) and Eric (Jonathan Groff) and their adoptive daughter Wenling (Kristen Cui) have gone on vacation, intending to spend a nice weekend away from it all in a (get this) cabin way out in the sticks. However, upon them descends a quartet who have some very bad news for them. Their leader, Leonard (Dave Bautista), first makes contact with young Wen, attempting to make friends but even more rapidly revealing to us that he's very distraught about what he's going to have to do, and that what he's going to have to do involves her and her dads. Within five minutes, we're already off to the races, as Leonard and his three colleagues—Redmond (Rupert Grint), Adriane (Abby Quinn), and Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird)—bash their way into the cabin with their weaponry, which includes what I believe to be a DIY halberd (let us pause here to say that my least favorite thing about the movie, by an enormous margin, is the dumbassed whimsy of their weapons when guns or machetes or even bats—swing away, Leonard—would absolutely do). They subdue the family and while Andrew and Eric, naturally enough, suspect this is related to their sexuality—and Andrew will prove unwilling to contemplate any alternative explanation—their attackers mournfully explain that that's not it. Instead, they have been chosen, by some power they can't explain, to save everything: each has suffered for years from visions of an apocalypse, and these visions have granted them the foresight to know how to avert it, but averting it means that one family—to wit, Andrew, Eric, and Wen—must, of their own free will, choose amongst themselves which of them will die, sacrificed to preserve the world.* They are, obviously, disbelieving. But as events mount up, mediated by way of Leonard's frequent recourse to the television news, and the world does in fact begin to look like it's ending, they have to wonder if these lunatics could be right.
I regret just spoiling the film (it's why I put up a warning) and I'll try to talk around most of the specifics, but that's probably whistling past the graveyard, because I can't see much of a purpose in anything but the shallowest discussion of Knock At the Cabin without saying, yes, Virginia, the lunatics are right. Besides the Shyamalan movie assumption that of course we'll be dealing with the avowedly fantastic, the screenplay barely even makes an attempt to suggest the attackers don't have the real inside scoop; my other "least favorite thing," pulled directly from the novel, involves Andrew hanging onto the very thin reed that he thinks he recognizes Redmond as the guy that queer-bashed him in a bar years earlier, and accordingly this is all some elaborate scheme. As a red herring this doesn't even begin to take; so actually my "least favorite thing" is that it turns out Andrew did recognize him, though this revelation comes at a point some time after that could possibly move the needle on "yeah, but he's still apparently a prophet." It's also a minor nitpick, but God (or whatever) could've led with the planes, that might've worked; then again, I would bet five dollars that there's an actual mistake in the screenplay, because they keep referring to an Aleutian earthquake that the quartet "already knew about," as a strike against them, when we see the second, Cascadia earthquake happen in real time.
But in any case, with this and Old Shyamalan has, in his later career, really embraced his "basically, I make Twilight Zones" core skillset, and it works out fairly well, though there's enough here that's clunky that it sometimes threatens to do damage to the stuff that's good. As noted, it's not usually as clunky as Old was but never as spectacular; and there's a lot that's smart about Cabin, if maybe not as smart as it seems like it ought to be, in the way that a movie smart enough to get this far should have been able to get all the way. (For example, it's much less prone to gummy exposition and thematic declamation than the average Shyamalan movie, but by God, it's going to make up for that in one of the worst bits of dialogue he ever wrote—or helped write, sure—when Groff is forced, potentially at gunpoint, to explain explicitly and more-or-less directly to the audience the symbolic value of our four horsemen in exactly the words a high school essay on the subject would have chosen.) Still, the only major, abiding "bad" is Andrew and Aldridge's performance thereof: some of this is probably intentional, although maybe not, because as the film expressly makes clear, this family's love is very pure, which is why I wonder if they meant to have his relationship with his husband be so unpleasant, above and beyond Andrew also being the vector for "humanity deserves to die" because somebody hit him with a bottle once. (He's also a human rights attorney; genocide is fine as long as it's fair, I guess.) He's belittling of Eric (even in the humanizing flashbacks!) and increasingly overbearing towards him, on top of one's suspicion that we're looking at the outward manifestations of a rather dead bedroom. Well, that or just the curious case of a movie happy to forward a gay couple as protagonists, yet, unless I actually blinked and missed it, at no point have them kiss or anything (even in the flashbacks). It's something of a blow for representation, I guess, that two gay men playing gay men can come off like straight actors would in the same roles.
But I don't know: has Shyamalan ever done anything romantic well? (I've still never seen The Village.) And I'm tangenting, anyway; he does rescue these characters from the unfortunate (probably accidental) subtext of the novel's ending, so that's nice, and my main thing is that Andrew is just, for lack of a better word, annoying, and that's partly conception and partly Aldridge: the movie damned near requires a much more affable Andrew, who scoffs rather than blusters in outrage, because the latter gets tiresome very quickly, and Aldridge is an especially bland vehicle for it. (Groff, meanwhile, is good, particularly at picking up and pushing down the prickly vibes that Aldridge is constantly sending his way—it's actually a fairly interesting relationship, just weirdly contorted by the thematic impositions placed upon it—and little Cui, grading on a child actor curve, is fine.) And I may be too hard on Aldridge, because it's not like the quartet is doing a good job of explaining themselves.
This could be and sometimes is a weakness, but becomes something approaching a strength in Bautista's (enormous) hands, his physicality conjuring immense threat that his quiet, sad performance and even his costuming is trying to push back against and—as Bautista is clearly aware even if Leonard isn't—both are failing; so instead he gets flustered and can only speak in the tones of crazy man portentousness even when this is obviously counterproductive, because of the urgency of his God-given mission. There's a legion of Bautista boosters out there and I've been relatively agnostic—I've always thought he was good, but I don't know on what basis the case was being made that he's great—but here it is, and if there were only the one thing to watch the movie for, it's him. The downside is that there's more yelling than discussion—a bit of a loop where they keep saying, "see? see?"—that works more for the single-location thriller than the Twilight Zone aspect of it, which would have really benefited from meatier conversations, especially since what we've got is a movie where half the runtime (at least) involves Aldridge and Groff tied up in chairs. I don't know if I mean lore, but I suppose I probably do, to give the prophecies and the resulting disasters some measure of personality, even if it remained a cosmic, impassive one—honestly, maybe it's just my temperament, but going sci-fi with it probably would've given this story more stability, even if it were at the expense of its chosen themes. (Then again, the absence of lore makes these insane murderers seem less crazy, because they haven't built a religion out of it and make no claims to understanding it, whereas every good conspiracy theorist has a fuckton of lore that they can't wait to share with you.) It does manage some fun, cerebral stuff, even so: notably a playfulness with how they all met online, which is the most salient piece of evidence against them; and there's the perverse complexion of the entire set-up, which is like a mixed-up cult deprogramming where the real cultists are, in fact, Andrew and Eric, presently being asked to free themselves from their religion of workaday pseudo-rationality in order to see an unlikely truth. By the time they begin to get worn down, even Aldridge's performance improves; he's much more apt to be interesting once he starts lying to himself. Above all, the movie does reasonably pose the question, "what does it take to believe in God?"
Shyamalan is still putting some oomph into the visual components, though with something of the opposite of the strategies that he'd brought to Old: that single-location film sought novelty in every image, and Shyamalan allows this one to grow ossified fairly quickly, not completely without variation, but quite possibly constructing the majority of his movie out of the same three level angles and jarringly-framed isolating shots within those angles, and it's hard to argue this isn't "correct" considering that the film is, after all, about returning to the same subject over and over until enough evidence (and bodies) have accumulated to be convincing. Also contra Old, he and cinematographers Jarin Blaschke and Lowell A. Mayer are working a lot with shallow focus, in a relatively disciplined way (there's no obnoxious racking and sometimes no racking at all, dialogue allowed to play out lines at a time with actors remaining fuzzy blobs); it can work out splendidly, especially with Bautista, whose single-mindedness has practically placed blinders on him, and it emphasizes the inner torment in his performance and the creeping doubt that even he still feels. (On the minus side, there are a couple of symbolic lens flares so fucking gaudy I assume they're creatures of post-production.) It is, nonetheless, very much akin to Old, almost as much as it's akin to Signs, very much an exercise in "let's throw some people into an impossible scenario and see how they shake out"—so much so that Shyamalan (who by a miracle of self-restraint manages to not entirely say this out loud), kicks his movie off with Wen collecting grasshoppers in a giant jar, so she can see how they shake out. Shyamalan may refrain from stating this aloud because the movie doesn't quite do this; the European version, anyway, gets real misanthropic real fast, probably with the nudge, "you know, she's adopted...", or with the fault lines in this relationship becoming brutally clear. I'm not sure it's actually a demerit that the movie does not, besides its finale, indulge in such calculus. (And so, sadly, the fate of the grasshoppers is left unresolved.)
There's some irritation with the exact mechanics sometimes, but for the most part it's a cracking lock-'em-in-a-room thriller when that's its operating mode; there's more than some irritation with some of these characters (to the extent Leonard's compatriots register, it might be more negatively than positively, and of course I've been on Aldridge's case the whole review). It's not by any means a great movie, and has enough strikes against it that I wonder if it's good—and like at least one much better Shyamalan movie, I imagine one's most enjoyable viewing of it would be one's first—but it's compelling, which is just about as good as good; if nothing else, it's a legitimately heady twist on "the home invasion thriller." Despite not being a film anyone would accuse of having a great sense of humor, it does close with a tragicomic final frame gag that I think I actually loved, and ending on one of your strongest notes isn't a bad way to keep me on your side.
Score: 6/10
*So obviously not a little similarity to The Cabin In the Woods, as this review's title dutifully notes.
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