Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, Kristen Cui
Year: 2023
Knock at the Cabin is getting mostly middling reviews, it’s ratings are very average, and I’ve generally heard/read generally nice/positive reports from audiences, so the question moves from “is this movie any good” to “if this movie is pretty good and everybody likes it, how come nobody actually likes it?” The answer is fairly simple; Shyamalan, who is obviously known for his horror twists, decided to buck the trend with this adaption, changing even the source material, until what we experience here is nothing like what we have come to expect from his films. Basically, he decided not to be ambiguous or surprising, just to make solid cinema, and while he succeeded, because it’s hard to find fault with this movie, he also failed miserably, because Knock at the Cabin is about as exciting and thought-provoking as a conversation with a door-to-door salesman
Wen, a young adopted girl, is at a cabin in the woods with her two dads, a sort of weekend getaway from the hustle & bustle of the city, a pleasant trip for a loving family. But out of the woods comes a giant of a man, a soft-spoken behemoth who says he wants to make friends with Wen before talking to her dads, and also that he’s sorry for what he is about to do. Four strangers total approach the cabin together, break inside, and take the family of three hostage, tying Andrew & Eric up and demanding that they listen to an explanation that sounds as crazy as this situation has quickly become; that the world will end very soon, unless 2 members of the family willingly kill the other 1, sacrificing a life to save the world.
So, this was a book first, and the book is much more ambiguous, allowing audiences to decide for themselves whether or not these people are nuts, whether or not there’s really impending doom. The movie takes a different approach, giving hints and clues and red herrings, but ultimately telling us what happened in a way that’s supposed to satisfy us. That’s exactly the problem; apparently we didn’t want to be told exactly what we just saw. It’s a great set up, very interesting, not scary, not bloody, just weird, and it all works well because Shyamalan is a master …until it stops working because he decided that he didn’t want to have to be the director we expected. Instead, he spells everything out, and we won’t thank him for it, as much as we appreciated the quality of the film in general. That can’t really be faulted; good acting, good music, good mood, good pace. It’s the decision not to be open to interpretation, the finalizing of the clues, that really spells this movie’s doom, and that’s something that I’ll be upset about for quite some time, because, otherwise, Knock at the Cabin was just great.
My rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆