Answer the door, it’s the first trail­er for M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin

When some­one goes on a love­ly vaca­tion with their fam­i­ly in a film direct­ed by M. Night Shya­malan, it can mean only cer­tain doom. Just last sum­mer, he turned an afternoon’s jaunt to the beach by a clan of resort-goers into a fight against accel­er­at­ed death in Old, and now he’s tak­en to that most clas­si­cal of hor­ror locales: the cab­in in the woods, where anoth­er twisty and twist­ed puz­zle box of sus­pense will be unlocked.

The first trail­er for Knock at the Cab­in appeared online in the dead of night, an unex­pect­ed move for a film that — like Old — appears to take place almost entire­ly in broad day­light. Though the Shya­malan car­ni­val-bark­er touch is evi­dent in a clip that reels its audi­ence in with the promise of a genre twofer that still leaves much to be revealed, even as it sets up a fiendish­ly clever premise.

Hus­bands Andrew (Jonathan Groff) and Eric (Ben Aldridge) have tak­en their daugh­ter Wen (Kris­ten Cui) for a week­end of sun and swim­ming at a wood­land get­away, but their idyll is soon dis­turbed by a home inva­sion. Break-ins aren’t so uncom­mon in the Shya­malan oeu­vre, but the intrud­ers (Dave Bautista, Rupert Grint, Nik­ki Amu­ka-Bird, and Abby Quinn) aren’t gar­den-vari­ety psy­chos tying up the hap­py cou­ple for the hell of it; they’ve come with a sen­si­tive propo­si­tion, explain­ing that this fam­i­ly has been select­ed to make a dif­fi­cult choice that could decide the fate of the planet.

The trail­er gives away the piv­ot from ​“home-inva­sion movie” to ​“apoc­a­lypse movie,” but there’s still plen­ty of mys­tery remain­ing, in par­tic­u­lar the ques­tion of what these poor bas­tards will be made to do for the sake of all humankind. The arrival of enig­mat­ic fig­ures with an unthink­able offer calls to mind Richard Kel­ly​‘s crim­i­nal­ly under­rat­ed The Box, in which a Twi­light Zone-ish set­up (a cou­ple has the chance to push a but­ton for one mil­lion dol­lars, know­ing that if they do, a ran­dom per­son will die) gives way to a more arcane mythol­o­gy involv­ing watery space aliens.

In any case, it’s a safe bet that we ain’t seen noth­ing yet, in that every­thing con­tained with­in the trail­er could have very well come from the first fif­teen min­utes of a still-shad­owy film. In the unpre­dictable uni­verse of eter­nal Night, no one is safe, espe­cial­ly not those just try­ing to enjoy them­selves at a leisure­ly excur­sion into nature.

Knock at the Cab­in comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 3 Feb­ru­ary. A date for the UK has yet to be set.