Wen (Kristen Cui) is happily collecting grasshoppers when Leonard (Dave Bautista) approaches her and begins making light conversation with the apprehensive, yet inquisitive, child.  Eventually, Leonard asks to meet the girl’s parents, but when she runs scared from him to find her dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), there comes an ominous knock at the door.  It is Leonard and three other weapon-wielding strangers, Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Redmond (Rupert Grint), and Ardiane (Abby Quinn).  The four warn the small family that they are here to prevent the apocalypse, but in order to do it, a grave sacrifice must be made. 

M. Night Shyamalan returns with Knock at the Cabin co-written with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, based on Paul Tremblay’s book.  For Universal Pictures, Shyamalan comes inside after Old (2021) and brings the end of the world down into a tight ensemble in this close-quarters suspense thriller with interiors shot by frequent Robert Eggers’ collaborator, cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, and exteriors largely handled by Lowell A. Meyer.  It is well blocked for being largely a single location, but Blaschke’s constant pulling focus and directing audiences where to look gets a little overdone and as there is no real visual misdirection employed, it would have been nice had he allowed us to clearly see the whole frame a little more often. The writing team also deviates from how things play out in the novel, but the inciting incident stays the same when the four strangers arrive at Eric and Andrew’s cabin, and present to the men a choice to sacrifice one of their own to save all of humanity.  From there, the film begins to march to the beat of its own drum, and these changes do muddy some of the metaphors at play, but overall Shyamalan and his team do manage a strong resolution albeit one that takes some distance and thought to become palpable. 

Bautista commands the screen early on imbuing his Leonard with the personality of a loveable giant.  He is fully committed to the role, and his commitment coupled with the flashes of world news that punctuate the film really puts audiences in the middle of it all questioning if what is happening is real or if it is all part of an elaborate home invasion; a candy-colored Funny Games (1997) or a spaghetti-less The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017).  As the ringleader of this apocalyptic posse, much of the film and selling the premise lies on Bautista’s shoulders, and coming from a background where his characters are often used as the butt end of the joke for his size as he often towers above the rest of the ensemble, it is a refreshing turn by the actor for audiences, and no doubt a fulfilling role for Bautista as he steps closer and closer to leading man territory.  Shyamalan, however, does not ignore the actor’s size and uses it to his benefit as he can keep Bautista in the frame and yet blocking key details to keep audiences – and the husbands – just out of reach from the answers.

The team he leads is an odd bunch to put it mildly. Quinn’s Adriane is a frantic mess who brings an air of unpredictability to the film, yet her motivations never seem to be rooted in malice. She and Amuka-Bird’s Sabrina match Leonard’s commitment to the cause as they try to convince Eric and Andrew that they are not lying to them. It is a wild concept to sell, but they can sympathize with the two dads and help bridge their side of the story to the audience as Adriane is also a parent and Sabrina a nurse. While Leonard acts with a heavy heart but a sense of unavoidable duty, the two women operate out of empathy and a desire to save as many people as possible. Which makes Grint’s Redmond a bit of an outlier. Short-fused, ill-mannered, and downright mean, it is revealed that he had a violent run-in with Eric and Andrew some years prior, and that realization brings about some seeds of doubt that will influence the understanding of everything that happens after it. When it is revealed the four met online through a message board, it further complicates their validity and adds a whole new level of doubt and discredit to their actions. At the same time, it heightens their danger as it likens them to Q-Anon who have acted out in eccentrically illegal ways all in the name of their ill-conceived cause. Further, and though it is unfair to the film to do so, audiences even passingly familiar with Shyamalan’s oeuvre will bring in some outside knowledge to their viewing and they know he has an affinity for an eleventh-hour twist, but Knock at the Cabin is a very mature work from the storied director who goes into this narrative with no clever tricks up his sleeve. 

Through the course of the narrative, the family is given a choice to sacrifice one of their own to prevent the apocalypse. Every time they refuse, a plague will be unleashed; massive tsunamis, a rapidly spreading virus, planes falling to the earth, and lastly an all-consuming darkness. As with Redmond’s encounter with the couple, the script sows seeds of doubt in that the news reports of these disasters are never live reports. It creates a feeling of discomfort and unease and makes for a very successful suspense thriller in this sense as audiences are constantly questioning along with the characters as to if this is real or all an elaborate hoax. Eventually, Eric makes the choice to sacrifice himself for the cause – a deviation from the novel which finds Wen dying in an unfortunate accident and God looking on, unsatisfied that this death meets the requirements of the sacrifice. It is understandable that Shyamalan would make that change, but it does make for a bit of a moral conundrum to unpack. While it is nice to see that storytelling has evolved to treat its gay characters in a horror film as this violence is not born from a place of hate, there is so much religious guilt sown into this narrative that it still feels pretty icky. Even though it is not a textbook definition of burying the queers, the film hinges on an already unsavory philosophy and by changing the main thesis of “how can an all-loving God be so uncaring?” to the choice of a loving family selecting a sacrificial lamb, it further complicates the narrative in a deeply uncomfortable way. The saving grace here is that at the end, it is revealed that Eric’s sacrifice does end the apocalypse and that he did not die for nothing, but it still does not feel like the most responsible way to tell this story. 

Putting the identity politics aside, there is one other element of the story that the forcing of a grave choice to be made really does not sit right. The first two plagues specifically are environmentally based and so for about half of the film’s runtime, it plays out as potentially an allegory for climate change and it puts the onus on the individual to make a sacrifice to change this course of destruction. It is not a small ask, either; the film is asking the men to kill one of their own while the Four Horsemen engage in some performative nonsense much in the same way the massive corporations will decry that any changes they make to operations to help shrink their footprint will negatively affect their precious profits, so the cost of change must all get passed down to the lowly consumer. Now, it is clear that Leonard and his crew do not have the means to stop the apocalypse on their own, but the film still feels as if it is, probably unintentionally, blaming the audience for the larger failure of their leaders. It is all part of the ripple effect that by avoiding the admittedly upsetting concept of Wen accidentally dying, it opens the story up to questions it was not prepared or equipped to answer.     

Despite these troubling elements, on a filmic level, Knock at the Cabin is the best Shyamalan has been in years. The cast is exciting, the premise engaging, and the cutaways through the news footage or brief flashbacks help to add some context to the world of the film and the lives of Eric and Andrew. Through them, the film shows a sampling of the senseless violence and hatred in the world, but it needs to define that so that the acts of love we see – as in the ones between the dads and their daughter – can give Eric’s sacrifice proper contextual meaning because there is something worth saving; the future can be bright and hopeful. Knock at the Cabin sits at a nice cross-section giving audiences plenty to mull over but presenting them in a far less punishing and more popcorn-friendly format than, say, Andrei Tarkovsky’s ruminations about how our treatment of nature will usher in the end of the world and the sacrifices we make for those we love. It is still too early to tell, but if this marks a changing point in Shyamalan’s filmography where he is no longer burdened by a twist ending, then it is a triumphant work that blends classic feelings of a suspense thriller with modern story elements that comment on our own turbulent times where there seems to crop up a new conspiracy or massive tragedy every week. Faith has often had influence over Shyamalan’s work, but seldom has it been addressed so bluntly than it is here with the question that if there is a true and loving god above, why does he do nothing in the wake of these tragedies but ask for more and more sacrifice from an already punished people.