“Knock at the Cabin” is a real load — 100 lugubrious minutes of what is intended as steadily mounting dread and apocalypse prevention seminar.
It’s frustrating because writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has made seriously good films and some that go splat. With every new Shyamalan project, millions of moviegoers have a way of holding out hope based on his best efforts, and the luck of the draw.
This one comes from the 2018 Paul Tremblay novel “The Cabin at the End of the World,” and there are moments when the adaptation by Shyamalan, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman — the filmmaker wrote his version based on Desmond and Sherman’s script — feels as if it might be getting somewhere, albeit slowly. The acting’s quite good. But there is more to filmmaking and storytelling than what the actors can do.
In a remote corner of the Pennsylvania woods, married dads Eric and Andrew are vacationing with their young daughter, Wen. Straight off, trouble: As Wen collects grasshoppers in a jar, amid the warm sunshine and cool shade captured by cinematographers Jarin Blaschke and Lowell A. Meyer, the girl spies a large man nearby, and coming closer.
This is Dave Bautista as Leonard, who weasels his way past Wen’s reluctance to talk to strangers. In his tightly coiled murmur, he mentions that he and three others will be paying a visit to her fathers very soon. They have an extremely important decision to make, he says.
This they do, very early in the movie that wastes no time and yet wastes an awful lot of it in other ways. Leonard’s soon joined by his associates, nurse Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), hotheaded ex-con Redmond (Rupert Grint) and restaurant cook Ardiane (Abby Quinn). Except for Redmond, they’re all oddly tormented and sympathetic to their captives, even though they carry fearsome-looking homemade weapons with nasty big pointy blades. Leonard and company bust their way into the cabin and begin their little pitch, explaining to the soon-tied-up-and-gagged family the situation. Which is: One of the three must be sacrificed in order to prevent a global apocalypse.
Leonard and company have been afflicted with shared “visions” of earthquakes, planes dropping out of the sky and such. Somehow they’ve been guided intuitively to this cabin in these woods to fulfill their grim but Earth-saving destiny. Are they garden-variety doomsayers? Or legit portents of Earth’s final credits?
The movie is part passive-aggressive home invasion thriller, part world’s-end nightmare and part unusually harsh Airbnb commercial. (It’s a really nice cabin.) “Knock at the Cabin” weaves in flashbacks of earlier times in the lives of Eric (played by Jonathan Groff, who was King George in “Hamilton”) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge). One flashback reveals a homophobic hate crime incident in a bar some years ago; another, the adoption in China of their daughter, played in present-day scenes by Kristen Cui.
I doubt if a viewer’s parental/non-parental status would have much to do with the enjoyment of Shyamalan’s latest. It’s a drag to have the whole of it so dependent on young Wen witnessing such traumatic yet dramatically thin events in close quarters. Weirdly, “Knock at the Cabin” perpetually seems to be stalling for time, taffy-pulling its simplest setups and exchanges in order to tease out meaning and subtext. The suspense doesn’t escalate so much as sidewind. Though there are some nicely realized glimpses (on the cabin’s TV, mostly) of what’s happening in the world as Leonard foretold — cellphone footage of a massive tsunami; jet airliners plummeting to earth — the story’s core, the family under siege, struggles to get a foothold.
Shyamalan had similarly attenuated narrative challenges in “Old” (2021), which let the audience get out ahead of the swerves and plot devices. That one kind of worked; this one, for me, doesn’t, and even with the storyline reworked from Tremblay’s novel for a less brutal multiplex experience (a matter of who lives and who dies), in the end you’re stuck with a hyperbolic no-win allegory of what countless same-sex couples face in America. If it’s not tragically common hate-crime viciousness, it’s the end of the damn world, as predicted by both the Book of Revelation and Dave Bautista.
———
'KNOCK AT THE CABIN'
1.5 stars (out of 4)
Rated: R (for violence and language)
Running time: 1:40
How to watch: In theaters Friday
———
