Knock at the Cabin

First there was the beach break from hell in Old, and now a coun­try­side cab­in is about to get a decid­ed­ly neg­a­tive review on Tri­pAd­vi­sor – Knock at the Cab­in is M Night Shyamalan’s sec­ond film in as many years to focus on a fam­i­ly whose idyl­lic escape is inter­rupt­ed by an omi­nous out­side threat.

While the car­nage in Old was the result of both alle­gor­i­cal greed and a weird nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non, the threat here is some­thing more mys­te­ri­ous, as a group of strangers pro­claim the apoc­a­lypse is nigh and only the cabin’s unsus­pect­ing inhab­i­tants have the pow­er to stop it.

Attempt­ing to relax in rur­al Pitts­burgh are hus­bands Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) along with their young daugh­ter Wen (Kris­ten Chui). While col­lect­ing grasshop­pers in the over­grown field out­side the cab­in, Wen is approached by Leonard (Dave Bautista), a meek but impos­ing stranger who asks if the pair can be friends. Despite her ini­tial scep­ti­cism, Wen warms to Leonard after he demon­strates his own grasshop­per-catch­ing skills. All the while, a group of oth­er fig­ures loom from the tree line, and it becomes clear that some­thing odd is going on.

Leonard and his asso­ciates Red­mond (Rupert Grint), Sab­ri­na (Nik­ki Amu­ka-Bird) and Adri­ane (Abby Quinn) are armed with pecu­liar, severe-look­ing weapons, and inform the fam­i­ly that they have to make an impos­si­ble choice in order to pre­vent the forth­com­ing apoc­a­lypse: they must will­ing­ly sac­ri­fice one of their own. Eric and Andrew are under­stand­ably scep­ti­cal, assum­ing Leonard and co to be a band of wan­der­ing psy­chopaths. Though ten­sion mounts as the group become increas­ing­ly fre­net­ic and evi­dence builds that there might be some truth to this bizarre claim.

The twin themes of fam­i­ly and sac­ri­fice have recurred through­out Shymalan’s films, and Knock at the Cab­in – while an adap­ta­tion of Paul G Tremblay’s ​‘The Cab­in at the End of the World’ rather than a total­ly orig­i­nal sto­ry – fits in nice­ly to his oeu­vre. There’s a sense he cares deeply about his char­ac­ters, nev­er wish­ing to inflict unnec­es­sary pain and suf­fer­ing upon them, which is no mean feat in a hor­ror film.

Shya­malan achieves this by con­vey­ing a sense of deep urgency, which gives the deci­sion at the film’s core a real sense of grave impor­tance, and his rather rad­i­cal alter­ations to the third act of Tremblay’s text actu­al­ly work well with­in the con­text of the sto­ry he’s has decid­ed to tell.

Shyamalan’s an opti­mist, see, despite what the macabre tone of so much of his work would have you believe. Films like The Sixth Sense, The Vil­lage and even Split are imbued with a belief in human con­nec­tion and strength. In Knock at the Cab­in, it’s impres­sive how much char­ac­ter devel­op­ment the film­mak­er packs into a 100-minute run­time, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en there are eight play­ers in the cast. As always he’s skilled at pick­ing his actors, with Bautista demon­strat­ing a soft inten­si­ty that feels quite dif­fer­ent from his past work, while young new­com­er Chui a total nat­ur­al in front of the camera.

If there is one major issue with Knock at the Cabin’s exe­cu­tion, it’s that the sto­ry does feel a lit­tle rushed – the action sup­pos­ed­ly takes place over a cou­ple of days, but we don’t gain much insight into the evenings, and it’s a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to believe that a fam­i­ly being held cap­tive would obe­di­ent­ly sleep through the night with­out attempt­ing to break free. But there’s still a great deal to admire, in par­tic­u­lar the rich cin­e­matog­ra­phy of Jarin Blaschke (best known for his col­lab­o­ra­tions with Robert Eggers) which cre­ates a pleas­ing con­trast from the sin­is­ter sce­nario, and the affec­tion with which Shya­malan treats all his char­ac­ters. Sure, there’s vio­lence, but there’s a whole lot of love too.