Knock at the Cabin is a Memorable Apocalyptic Thriller from the Twisted Mind of Frightmaster M. Night Shyamalan

Old Twisty McTwister is back with a thriller that is honestly a little light on twists.

The notorious 2004 Sci-Fi Channel special The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan sought to answer a question on everyone’s mind at the turn of the millennium: why is Philadelphia-based fright master M. Night Shyamalan, the genius behind The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs so superhumanly talented? 

How can anyone, particularly someone so young, make fright fables that connect with the masses in such a profound and powerful way? How can the master filmmaker create tales of supernatural intrigue that feel so authentic and real? 

Why is the writer-director of The Sixth Sense so unbelievably great? What, in other words, is his secret? Could it have something to do with him dying for a half hour as a child, and then coming back to the land of the living with a unique understanding of the afterlife that informs everything he does? 

The answers were as disappointing as the movie The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan was promoting—2004’s The Village—as well as follow-ups The Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender and After Earth. 

As the string of flops and all-time stinkers would unfortunately illustrate, Shyamalan was not superhumanly talented or blessed with preternatural gifts and a connection to the spirit world. He was just a guy who had made some very good movies and some VERY bad ones and was unmistakably talented as well as amusingly full of himself, a world-class narcissist even by show-business standards. 

Shyamalan became a laughing stock and a walking punchline after being heralded as the next Steven Spielberg. We made him a God then laughed long and hard and derisively at him for close to a decade before he scored a comeback with 2015’s The Visit that continues to this day. 

We told Shyamalan that he was a genius for the ages, then got annoyed when he began to believe his own press. 

Shyamalan enthusiastically participated in the writing of The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, a fawning hagiography about how Shyamalan stood up to the small-minded philistines at Disney so that he could make The Lady in the Water his way, without compromising his sacred creative vision.

As the subtitle conveys, the book was supposed to be a heroic account of a maverick visionary standing up to corporate cowardice and conformity. Unfortunately Shyamalan’s vision turned out to fucking suck and he came off as a petulant egotist who lacked the perspective and maturity to acknowledge his glaring faults as a filmmaker and human being. 

Though both are extra-textual works, The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan and The Man Who Heard Voices revealed the filmmaker’s true core as much, if not more, than his beloved early hits or his mid-period fiascos. 

They also helped explain how Shyamalan could go from the tippy-top of the A-list to being synonymous with bad movies, godawful dialogue, facile twists and egregious phoniness. 

After rising to the highest of heights and falling to the lowest of lows Shyamalan has found a solid professional groove over the past eight years directing claustrophobic, modestly budgeted horror-thrillers with flashy premises like 2015’s The Visit, 2016’s Split, 2019’s Glass and 2021’s Old. 

The trend continues with Knock at the Cabin. Knock at the Cabin did not begin life inside the twisted mind of fright-master M. Night Shyamalan. His sick imagination did not dream up the film’s premise. 

Knock at the Cabin is an adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World with a screenplay co-written by Shyamalan, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman that feels unmistakably like it could have come from the Unbreakable director’s uniquely warped cerebellum. 

That is also to say that Knock at the Cabin feels like a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone in ways both good and bad. I can’t help but feel like I’ve seen variations on the film’s central premise in multiple horror anthologies, including various incarnations of Rod Serling’s beloved brainchild. 

In Knock at the Cabin Eric (Jonathan Goff), his husband Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) are visited in a cabin by four weapon-wielding strangers with a story as seemingly fantastical as it is horrifying. 

In a performance of terrifying gentleness, Dave Bautista plays Leonard, the leader of the strangers. He’s a rippling man-mountain who worked happily as a teacher and coach in the Chicagoland area before he began receiving ghoulish visions of the apocalypse revealing his destiny and the central role he will play in determining humanity’s future.

Leonard joins together with wild-eyed bad seed Redmond (Rupert Grint), overwhelmed nurse Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and crunchy baker Adriene (Abby Quinn) in the woods to try to convince Eric, Andrew and Wen that they alone have the power to prevent the apocalypse. 

Leonard tells the family that the world will end unless they decide to sacrifice one of their own and then kill that choice. It’s an impossible dilemma. Do you sacrifice yourself or the people you love most to save humanity? 

The home invaders seem nearly as traumatized by the situation as the family, who are held prisoner in the cabin until they make that awful, possibly essential decision.

Leonard plays the family news footage of unprecedented extinction-level events in a not altogether successful attempt to impress upon them that he’s an honest man with a horrible duty to perform and not the psychotic lunatic he might appear to be. 

Bautista plays Leonard as a digital age version of Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac: a man of true, unshakable faith being asked to do the unthinkable for the most righteous of reasons. 

At the center of Bautista’s scarily still performance lies a profound ambiguity. Depending on the ultimate reality of the situation he’s either a hulking monster terrorizing a nice family for no good reason at all or humanity’s savior, a jacked-up Jesus forcing three unlucky souls into committing murder. 

Shyamalan plays up the agonizing claustrophobia, locking us in a cabin with these people and an impossible situation. The filmmaker creates a sense of visceral dread by shooting much of the film in close-ups and medium shots. 

Herdís Stefánsdóttir’s low-end, bass-heavy score similarly ratchets up the dread and paranoia, the sense of being unable to escape not just a bad situation but quite possibly the worst. 

The four unwelcome strangers sacrifice themselves as punishment for failing to achieve their all-important ends and to press upon the family the gravity of the situation.

The family at the center of Knock at the Cabin are drawn with great affection and care. They’re aspirational in the strength and depth of their love and their commitment to one another. 

They’re a loving family worth fighting for, three very good people faced with an awful choice. This is wise. You want the audience to identify with and like the couple at the core, to see their ultimate fate as anything but insignificant in the face of a possible apocalypse. It would consequently be a mistake to have the trio be two nice, lovely, empathetic human beings and notorious toilet rocker GG Allin. 

Allin’s whole thing was courting death. If anything, you’d be doing that guy a favor by putting him out of his misery.  There’s no moral quandary in a version of this story where GG Allin is a main character. 

The only relief and escape from the crushing intensity of the family’s dilemma comes in flashbacks to the family’s idyllic early life together and through an incredibly distracting director’s cameo from Shyamalan as a Home Shopping Club pitch-man. 

Shyamalan’s irritating cameo is one of a series of false or fake notes the film strikes but it otherwise commits to its luridly compelling premise with woozy, delirious conviction. 

Knock at the Cabin is a reminder of both Shyamalan’s tremendous strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller. It has a metaphorically rich, dense premise whose ramifications it seems uninterested in pursuing because it’s so relentlessly focussed on the present and the idea that there might not be a future. 

Knock at the Cabin is a film of tremendous urgency and immediacy. On the surface it’s tense and engaging but I have no idea how it will settle in my mind, whether it will grow in richness and depth with time or recede as the kind of cheap, manipulative nonsense that needs to put a child in terrible danger to generate tension. 

In the end Shyamalan is not Steven Spielberg or Ed Wood. He’s not the best or the worst, a preeminent super-genius or a world-class hack. He is, however, an auteur and this fascinating, frustrating and memorable thriller reflects his strong personality and sensibility.