Knock At The Cabin Review: Great Concept, Poor Execution

Knock At The Cabin, Universal Studios

Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic

The M. Night Shyamalan experience is a roller coaster ride, with wild swings in quality from film to film and sometimes even scene to scene. His latest film is Knock at the Cabin, based on a 2018 novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, it is a home invasion thriller turned on its head with apocalyptic consequences, and, as with most Shyamalan features, it is a mixed bag.

Four strangers approach a family of three that is vacationing in a remote cabin. They are brandishing weapons, but they politely ask to be let into the cabin so they can talk about something important (this is not a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses gone bad). 

They meet resistance and eventually, they give up asking and break into the cabin, subduing the family and tying them up. At this point, they tell them that their family has been chosen and one of them must be sacrificed to save the world. Not only must one of them be sacrificed, but the family must also choose which one it is. If they fail to do so, ever-escalating global events will unfold until all of humanity is destroyed. 

In the words of Dennis Hopper in Speed, “What do you do, Jack, what do you do”?

If you are the family in an M. Night Shyamalan movie, in this case, Eric (Jonathan Groff), Andrew (Ben Aldridge), and their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui), you refuse to make a choice. You band together and say that you choose your family: that you aren’t going to let your love, which has been attacked and viewed as lesser or wrong in the eyes of bigots, be snuffed out by apparently delusional religious fanatics. 

If you are the home invaders, in this case, Leonard (Dave Bautista), Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane (Abby Quinn), and Redmond (Rupert Grint), you menace this family initially, then try to reason with them by telling them about your shared visions of the end of the world. Finally, you ask them to choose, and turn on the television for breaking news of increasing signs of the end of the world. 

What trips up Knock at the Cabin is the necessity of contrived conflict between the two sides, the family and the home invaders. Put in the shoes of either side, I am personally doing a lot more talking and reasoning, either to be released on one side or to plead the case for humankind on the other side. 

Instead, after the first event, basically nothing transpires between the two sides until the next morning when another chance to make a sacrifice is needed. Granted, this kind of dialogue and back and forth is likely not compelling in a visual medium like film and works better on the page. 

But the home invaders not pleading more earnestly does not come across as believable, and Andrew’s adamant refusal to believe any of the mayhem he is seeing on TV happening in the outside world (nothing more than pre-scheduled news broadcasts, whatever that means) is equally weak and strains credulity.

Knock at the Cabin is an interesting premise about sacrificing one person to save humanity and coming at it from both sides. Having the couple at the center of the film be a gay couple adds an extra layer of complexity to the equation. As the film hints at, and eventually shows through flashbacks, they’ve experienced their fair share of homophobia, so why should they have to sacrifice anything? 

Apparently, there are some giant liberties taken with the plot that greatly deviate from its source material and eliminate most of the ambiguity found there. 

While I found the story itself to be fairly uneven and unconvincing in both directions regarding the decision the family is asked to make, I did enjoy several of the performances, particularly Dave Bautista and Kristen Cui. 

Bautista, to his credit, has developed a gentle giant on-screen persona that he is able to tap into and modulate across several films. Kristen Cui also has a natural ease as a child actor that is so vital to a child performance. These two have a few shared scenes together, particularly an extended one at the opening, that are among the best in the crisp 100-minute runtime of the film.

Shyamalan is a filmmaker known for his twist endings. The twist with Knock at the Cabin is more about the intentions of the home invaders than the ending itself, which is pretty straightforward by Shyamalan standards. I was interested enough to make time to see this film in the theater, despite me being much more cautious when it comes to any M. Night Shyamalan movie, but Knock at the Cabin is better in concept than in execution (no pun intended).

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

You can follow OnScreen Blog’s movie commentary on Twitter @onscreenblog