'Knock At The Cabin' Review: M. Night Shyamalan Knocks Again With BMovie Thrills
Whoa Whoa! who is there Well, it's M. Night Shymalan from Knock at the Cabin - Good Times at the Movies.
Ever since Shyamalan's breakthrough film The Sixth Sense gave us the catchphrase "I see dead people," the writer-director has a knack for telling stories with the simplest of hooks to shock you after watching his latest film. Now in theaters, it's based on The Cabin at the World's End by Paul G. Tremblay is a novel and has a disturbing premise: What would you sacrifice to save the world?
Still on the heels of the January blockbuster Avatar : The Last Airbender, Knock on the Hat is a small film with big ideas. He faces the greatest danger - the end of the world - but explores it in a very intimate microcosm.
Little Wayne (Kristen Cui) is hanging out in an isolated room when a big, ugly man (Dave Bautista) comes out of the woods with a bad idea. Wayne and her adoptive parents, Eric and Andrew (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge), fall in with a group of fantasy-driven bigots.
Few films use this setting as a springboard for survival horror films, where a family is forced to defend itself against alien invaders through extraordinary action. But the story goes in a different direction, more character driven and disturbing. The villains are righteous and apocalyptic, defiant with an unsettling decency.
Dave Bautista is excellent as the disgraced sociopathic gang leader. It is a towering monolith, a framed physical nightmare whose immutability makes it all the more frightening in its emotionality. He's far scarier than the muscular, one-dimensional Bond villain here in Ghost , and builds on the quiet, scene-stealing vulnerability we saw in Blade Runner 2049 .
Rupert Grint (former Harry Potter star of Shyamalan's recent Apple TV Plus series The Servant) is also excellent as the nervous and eccentric redneck, adding a dose of brutal instability to the mix. Nikki Amuka-Bird and Abby Quinn have small roles, but they add heart and even a few laughs amid the mounting horror.
At first glance, Knock to the Cabin is a sad horror story that puts you in the shoes of a kidnapped family. From the unnerving, open French doors to the moment their father was caught in his nightclothes, the family was incredibly vulnerable. In addition, having small children skip parents (especially if they read books).
The grim aspects of this story are heartbreaking, but there's a sense that Shyamalan is pulling his punches. Like Shyamalan's recent work, this unsettling atmosphere recalls films like Inheritance and Exit , but it doesn't rely on grotesque gore.
Similarly, a very simple composition does not fill the entire film. We have many flashbacks to Eric and Andrew's relationship that enriches their characters and helps us identify with them. But the flashback may be the film's most embarrassing part. While it's fun to watch two people fall in love and support each other through their hardships, it's not always fun (or at least not as fun as trying to escape from the vicious aliens in the cage). This background creates an interesting and complex situation, but it is never allowed to develop because the characters involved quickly disappear from the story.
Knocking in the Cabin is told sparingly and cheaply, giving us plenty of room to ponder the deep universal themes raised by the dilemma of despair. Face the reality of a world headed for hell and it's our power to stop it. And in contrast to the preachy tone of Adam McKay's apocalyptic satire Do n't Look Up, Shyamalan's film subtly conveys the responsibility we each bear for the future of our planet. This is the problem we must finally face: What sacrifices will our generation have to make so that our children can have a world in which to live?
And of course, starting with The Sixth Sense, we're forced to wait for a twist ending. Shyamalan's last film, the shocking Old Man on the Beach, broke the genre with an over-the-top ending that explained everything. Wisely, Nok at Cabin makes things more ambiguous.
You have to appreciate how M. Night Shymalan constantly creates big ideas for tense and disturbing B-movies. Cabinet Knocking may not be as nerve-wracking as similar horror films, but Shyamalan's films are always welcome when played.
