Knock at the Cabin review: M. Night Shyamalan goes dystopian in the woods

What fresh apocalypse is this? In a world already acutely attuned to end-times, it’s increasingly hard to keep track of all the fictional dystopias that books and movies and TV shows seem so eager to throw at us like Mardi Gras beads. (You get a plague! You get a plague!)

But Armageddon, of course, is a bell that filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has famously been ringing for more than two decades now. Which puts a certain burden of expectation on his latest, Knock at the Cabin — a story already based on a bestselling novel by Paul Tremblay, a writer whom Stephen King once cheerfully declared “scared the living hell” out of him.

And so the stark and spooky premise of Knock feels like a promise: a happy family having a bucolic weekend in the woods; four strangers at the door. Surely Shyamalan, notorious twist-lord of the modern multiplex, has a deeper plan for this. And he does mark the spot, at least, with casting: The loving parents are Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Fleabag‘s Ben Aldridge), and their pigtailed daughter, Wen (Kristen Cui), we see in tender flashbacks, is adopted from China, with a bright pink scar slashed beneath her nose.

When a hulking meat slab of a man who introduces himself as Leonard (Dave Bautista) approaches Wen while she’s playing in the forest, she answers his careful questions about her scar and her two dads warily; she knows she’s not supposed to talk to strangers. But Leonard is gentle and persistent, and he brought three friends with heavy artillery: Redmond (Rupert Grint), Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and Ardiane (Abby Quinn).

Their homemade weapons look like something out of Mad Max arts and crafts, and their message is frantic but firm: If one of the three baffled hostages standing before them isn’t sacrificed voluntarily, the world will end — specifically, seas will rise, God’s fingers will scorch the earth, and pestilence and carnage will bring everlasting darkness. Eric and Andrew, understandably, object to this plan. What proof do these wild-eyed weirdos who claim to be ordinary teachers and line cooks and nurses have, other than their own insistence on shared visions of Biblical annihilation?

That’s where Knock begins to cleave away from the novel and perhaps the Black-Listed screenplay, which Shyamalan reportedly rewrote. It’s also where he loses a lot of story momentum, maintaining a terrible tension in the room — per the visions, for every refusal another person must die — that his script often fails to make any real sense of. Huge questions go unasked and explanations unoffered as a cabin full of terrified people whisper-yell at each other, then say the same things again when they don’t feel heard the first time.

That panic and repetition might be true to life — who, faced with abject terror, becomes both a brilliant negotiator and an action hero? — but it makes for frustratingly obtuse filmmaking when so many integral plot points are left by the wayside. So do Shyamalan’s significant changes to the latter half of the story, which recasts his entire narrative in a kind of beatific, quasi-religious light. (The original ending was far too bleak and open-ended, no doubt, for mainstream horror, though that may be exactly why it should have gone to a less-established name.)

What’s left is a handful of earnest, affecting performances — Bautista as the gentle giant, Groff as an essentially good man grappling with incomprehensible choices — and a tensile dread that dissipates with the too-tidy ending. Shyamalan may be saying something meaningful about faith or environmental destruction or the corrosive fraying of the social contract (could this vigilante crew really be motivated by pure homophobia, as Andrew believes?). But the message is mostly lost in sentiment, and a lingering sense of the better, messier movie that might have been.