"Knock at the Cabin": M. Night Shyamalan's Hot Streak Stays Fiery
Dave Bautista is superb in this new horror-thriller from the the one and only M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalinagans to ensue.
With the benefit of twenty-five years of hindsight, it now feels fair to break down M. Night Shyamalan’s filmmaking career into three distinct phases:
Breakout Success (1999-2004): Shyamalan breaks onto the scene with 1999’s The Sixth Sense, following it up with a string of hits like Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village. Critics call him “The Next Spielberg.”
Career Catastrophe (2006-2013): Shyamalan’s career plummets into a critical black hole with horrendous releases like The Lady in the Water, The Happening, and The Last Airbender. Critics label him a fluke director who tricked us into thinking he was good.
Resurgence and Redemption (2015-2023): Shyamalan returns to form with a hot streak of mid-budget thrillers like The Visit, Split, and Old. Critics are still wary of the dude’s talents, but are happy to be watching fun movies.
Over the course of this last quarter-decade, we’ve seen Shyamalan’s career rise and fall in a manner akin to a three-act structure: there’s a rise, a fall, and finally a redemption—one that, if Knock at the Cabin is anything to go by, we still seem to be living in.
Because boy oh boy, this movie is a good time. A taut horror-thriller with a supernatural edge, Knock at the Cabin follows in the tradition of Shyamalan’s more recent films, where he seems to have truly found his niche. With films like Split and Old, Shyamalan found strength in sequestering a small group of characters into claustrophobic locations and forcing them to face their own mortality. Knock at the Cabin adheres to these same Shyamalanic tenets: an innocent family, an apocalyptic cult, and a Cabin at the End of the World. (That’s the name of the book that Knock at the Cabin was based on! Man, I’m clever.)
As with almost all his films, Knock at the Cabin is set in Shyamalan’s home state of Pennsylvania; perhaps more unusual is that it is set in a rustic cabin away from the city. Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge play Eric and Andrew, a married couple vacationing in the wooded wilderness with their adoptive daughter Wen (Kristen Cui). The film opens, brilliantly, on Wen catching grasshoppers in front of the cabin; her dads are relaxing inside. A large man (Dave Bautista) soon appears from the distant woods. He approaches Wen and asking her name. Introducing himself as Leonard, he seems friendly and genuine. Cinematographers Jarin Blaschke and Lowell A. Meyer film their conversation (as they do the rest of the film) in intimate close up, with a shallow focus lens and tilting Dutch angles that make us more and more uneasy in the company of this gentle giant.
Three others—Redmond (Rupert Grint), Adriane (Abby Quinn), and Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird)—emerge from the wilderness carrying weapons (though Leonard calls them “Tools”), scaring Wen back inside to her dads. Leonard and his band approach the door, asking if they could be let in. A few minutes later and Eric and Andrew are tied up in chairs, these Four civilian Horsemen standing before them. Each of them have independently had visions of the end of the world, claims Leonard, and have been informed by some higher power that this family has the solution. How? A sacrificial lamb: Eric, Andrew, and Wen must willingly sacrifice one of their own. If they don’t? Congratulations, you’ve caused the apocalypse!
If Knock at the Cabin works as a thriller—and it really, really does—it’s not just because of its wonderfully tense setpieces, but because of how effortlessly Shyamalan implements larger questions of faith and belief into this crushing atmosphere. It isn’t an accident that Andrew, an atheist, rejects everything Leonard says, nor is it a coincidence that Eric, a believer, seems willing to at least consider the possibility that these apocalyptic psychos might be onto something. Matters become complicated when Leonard turns on the television to reveal a series of Biblical plagues: Tsunamis hitting the Pacific Northwest, a devastating global virus (sound familiar?), planes inexplicably falling from the sky. Did Leonard and co. cause these to happen? Or is it just coincidence?
And what about Redmond, who looks something like the homophobe that sent Andrew to the hospital a few months back? Knock at the Cabin is constantly cutting to flashbacks of Eric and Andrew’s past, including to one brilliantly ambigous image of a man who may or may not be Rupert Grint smashing a bottle down upon Andrew’s head. The film’s editing and cinematography is superb here as it is throughout, the two working in symbiotic harmony to further a feeling of distrust in one’s senses. In pointed cinematic form, Shyamalan argues that, however strong our faith, we can never know the truth, if it exists at all.
[The next couple paragraphs discuss the end of the film, so don’t read if you don’t want spoilers.]
A lot of fuss has been made about the film’s ending, which deviates from Paul G. Tremblay’s novel in a big way. In the novel, Wen dies accidentally in a scuffle between Leonard and Andrew, and ends with Eric and Andrew choosing not to kill one another despite the apparent apocalypse that surrounds them. In the film, Wen survives and Eric dies—he chooses to sacrifice himself in the belief that it will save the planet. And apparently, it does! Andrew and Wen see on TV screens how the Tsunamis are ending, the virus is slowing, planes are recovering their flight paths. But was it Eric’s sacrifice that caused life to continue? Or was it just coincidence?
The ending here isn’t as different from the book as you might think. In both instances, we still don’t know what is responsible for these world-ending affairs, nor what stops them. The difference is more emotive than thematic: while Tremblay leans into the horror of unknowability, Shyamalan leans into hope. Andrew and Wen will never know if Eric’s sacrifice saved the planet, but they can choose to believe that it was, if they so choose. This may give them meaning, it may not. Either way—and as with Tremblay’s novel—the responsibility is theirs and theirs alone.
[Spoilers over]
Knock at the Cabin has just kicked Avatar: The Way of Water off its seven-week reign at the box office No. 1, and it’s easy to see why. A 100-minute thriller with a standout star performance (Dave Bautista, proving that he is a force to be reckoned with) and something to say feels like more and more of a rarity in Hollywood. Shyamalan, after all his ups and downs, might just be cornering the market on this particular subgenre. I couldn’t be happier.