Experimenting with direction, Shyamalan’s “Knock At The Cabin” is a film that needed more. PHOTO CREDIT: fandango.com
M. Night Shyamalan is a very diverse filmmaker, to put it nicely. He has managed to make some of the best and worst movies you can find, all within the timeframe of about ten years.
His newest film “Knock At The Cabin” manages to sit perfectly in between the highs of “The Sixth Sense” and the lows of “The Last Airbender.” While the film is thankfully not another horrid misstep, it is far from anything amazing, which unfortunately makes it a rather forgettable entry in Shyamalan’s filmography.
The film’s story, adapted from the 2018 novel “The Cabin at the End of the World” by Paul Tremblay, is the first positive I will give. While vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand they make a choice to prevent the apocalypse. Confused, scared and with limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.
It is an intriguing premise right from the beginning and the film wastes no time getting to the point where everyone is in the cabin and the stakes have been set. The film heavily relies on the conflict between the four armed strangers and the family and it especially plays with the idea that the four strangers could be crazy or they could be right.
Evidence is brought up to support both claims and it is unclear until the very end which one Shyamalan will end up going with. This mystery kept me entertained and intrigued throughout the entire running time, even if a scene or two go on for a bit too long.
I also thought the performances ranged from acceptable to surprisingly good. Our main family of two dads, Andrew the skeptic and Eric the open minded, and an adopted daughter, Wen the innocent, all carry their own weight and fill their roles quite well. Ben Aldridge as Andrew was a particular standout who manages to be frustrated and angry while never coming across as comical or over the top, a difficult line to walk.
Dave Bautista also shines in a very restrained and socially awkward role as Leonard, the leader of the group of strangers. He has his moments to be angry and put that massive body of his to good use physically, but he is more reserved and gentle in this movie than I was expecting. It is always refreshing to see an actor change the audience’s expectations and perceptions of who they are and what material they can handle.
Shyamalan also continues to experiment with his directing. Sometimes it can come across as a bit unnecessary, a conversation that opens the film that involves the camera tilting more and more with every shot comes to mind. However, he also does a few very unique things behind the lens. During a fistfight the camera tracks the fists as they fly left and right which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.
Unfortunately, the film is not perfect or even particularly great, and I think that comes down to the script. This very much seems like a pandemic movie, a movie people made during COVID where only a few people could be on set at a time to keep things safe and this movie takes place in the cabin for most of its runtime. When a movie takes place in one location you need to have interesting characters, interesting dialogue and an interesting story. As far as I’m concerned, story is the only box getting checked off here.
Since the story starts very quickly, we don’t have much time to spend with Andrew, Eric and Wen before things go downhill. Due to this, Shyamalan has to throw in little scenes of the family bonding and hanging out throughout the movie to help us empathize with them and care about them and it didn’t quite work for me.
It seemed a little too desperate and I think another draft might have helped flesh out the family. The four strangers are also rather unmemorable and too similar to each other to stand out which hinders their effectiveness as antagonists.
By the time the film ends and the audience learns whether Leonard and his acquaintances were insane or right about the end of the world, I found myself more interested in whether or not the apocalypse would strike instead of the deeper, more emotional character drama and I feel like it should have been the other way around.
While “Knock At The Cabin” is far from Shyamalan’s worst film, it is equally far from his best. It is a perfectly average and competently made movie that features surprisingly effective performances that desperately needed a better script.