Knock at the Cabin

As a filmmaker, M. Night Shyamalan either runs hot or cold with me.  Either I buy what he's selling, or I don't, with no in-between.  Knock at the Cabin is probably his strongest film in a while, and one I can say grabbed me almost instantly.  Granted, some of the director's annoyances (stilted dialogue, awkward close ups and camera movements) are on full display.  But he has a suspenseful story here that is expertly told by a fine cast.

The film is a mostly successful adaptation of the acclaimed novel, The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay.  I say mostly, as there are two major changes that I was not a fan of, but not to the effect that it lessened my enjoyment of the film.  And while I won't go into spoilers, I will say that the final moments the movie reaches do not match Tremblay's.  The original ending was much more ambiguous, and was able to create genuine dread.  As a filmmaker, Shyamalan is not a fan of ambiguity.  He likes to spell out exactly how we are supposed to feel, so he gives us a definitive answer to wrap up everything.  It kind of kills the overall effectiveness of the story, but since it occurs in the last five minutes or so, it did not lessen my enjoyment of the experience itself.

Until those final five minutes, I was completely on board, as the movie creates a tight atmosphere that builds slowly and wonderfully out of a simple premise, and a small cast who find the right note to play this material. Parents Eric (Broadway veteran Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) are vacationing in a remote New Jersey cabin with their seven-year-old adoptive daughter, Wen (Kristen Cui), when they are approached by an imposing yet charismatic man named Leonard (Dave Bautista).  He arrives on the property with three others, and claims that he and those who are with him have witnessed visions of the apocalypse, and that in order to prevent it, someone in the family must be chosen to be sacrificed.  What both the original novel and this adaptation do beautifully is how it handles these characters, and the situation they find themselves in.

Leonard and the people traveling with him are not crackpots, nor are they cultists.  They are calm, rational people for the most part, and come from different walks of life.  Leonard is an elementary school teacher and Little League baseball coach.  With him is Emergency Room Nurse Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a line cook with a young son back at home named Adriane (Abby Quinn), and a former convict trying to go straight named Redmond (Rupert Grint), who is the most hot-headed of the group.  They claim that a mysterious power has granted all four of them the same vision, and given them orders to seek this family out.  They have traveled to this location together, having never met before, and are determined to save humanity by letting this family choose which one of them will die to prevent the coming disaster.

Naturally, Eric and Andrew don't buy it.  Andrew even suspects that this may be a hate crime of some sort, and they are being targeted.  That's when the evidence begins to stack up of news reports concerning one mass disaster after another happening all over the world.  Eric is the one who is a bit more willing to believe them, creating tension within the family itself.  Knock at the Cabin plays it low key and smart throughout.  Leonard and his followers are not the villains of the story, and aside from young Wen, no one is truly innocent.  There are many small moments where we get to learn about who these people are, and the lives they lead before the visions brought them to this cabin.  This is not a story about learning the truth, which is why the altered ending that gives us a definitive conclusion did not sit well.

Before that, this movie is a masterclass of subtle suspense and storytelling, and aside from one major change halfway through, follows the original story quite faithfully.  Everyone is able to create a rounded and human character, with Bautista and Aldridge being the key stand outs.  Nobody plays these roles to the hilt, and they always let us see the tragedy of this situation.  The family is placed in an impossible situation, and the people invading their home do not want to put them within it, but feel they have no choice.  This is material that could easily have resulted in a lot of melodramatic screaming to the rafters or chewing the scenery, but Shyamalan and his cast find the consistent right tone here.

Even if Knock at the Cabin has gone through some unfortunate changes that lessens the impact, this is still an incredibly tense experience that is worth watching.  Usually, Shyamalan has a hard time finding the humanity in his stories or his actors, creating a wooden atmosphere.  Here, he gets almost everything right.

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