[Rating: Minor Rock Fist Down]
If you think about it, Knock at the Cabin is a pretty dumb title. It says something without actually saying anything … which pretty much sums up the latest M. Night Shyamalan thriller, a film that wants to be a three-run homer to win the game, but instead is closer to being a long fly ball past the foul poll, followed by the inevitable, double play to end any hopes of fun.
Unfortunately, it never stands up to the promise of its premise, a trait that has become more and more common in the filmography of a director that once gave us The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable.
Based on the novel, The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay — a way, way cooler title in my opinion — the film begins with young Wren (Kristen Cui) playing alone while on vacation with her two fathers, played by Jonathan Groff (The Matrix Resurrections) and Ben Aldridge (Our Girl), when she is thrown into stranger danger territory when four normal ass dudes wander out of the woods, politely take her family hostage and tell them they must make the choice to sacrifice a member of their family or the world will end.
The cast is solid, led by Bautista (Glass Onion) as Leonard, a humble man on a mission. The rest of friends of fate group is made up of Nikki Amuka-Bird (Jericho Ridge), Rupert Grint (Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities), and Abby Quinn (the Mad About You revival). They’re all fine and good but they present 100% zero menacing threat, despite the fact they’re all armed with weapons straight out of one of those The Purge flicks. They’re scary and aggressive and then they’re just like, “can you please do it?” and things just kinda play out, slowly without any real sense of urgency other than taking four people at their kindest word.
Disasters play out on TV through news footage to try and up the stakes once the initial set up has been met, but by the end of the third act it just kinda stalls on its own inability to really test the waters of the morality questions its trying to ask. There are no twists. No turns. No clever or over the top last minute plot twist to make you think twice about what you have seen. All violence, while possibly brutal, is off screen so we’re never shown the horrors of the terrifying ramifications when deadlines aren’t met.
The premise of the movie in an of itself is a fascinating theoretical moral set up. Could you make that decision? How do you make that decision? Is humanity worth the sacrifice? Is the guilt of not making the choice bearable to endure? Those questions, along with… is this real? Can Leonard be trusted? Is Dave Bautista a better actor than The Rock could ever dream of being? Most of these questions are raised during the course of this slim but slow paced thriller.
Unfortunately, what M. Night delivers in set up, he lacks in execution during the third act, especially. You know that meme where it’s the bored dude poking a something with a stick urging it to “come on, do something”? This is the movie equivalent. It’s a waiting game for a payoff that never comes. All of the interesting questions are introduced in the trailer. There are no new elements introduced. Even the back stories for our three protagonists are so ho-hum and contrived it’s hard to determine who we’re really supposed to be rooting for.
For all the questions of morality that go into deciding not who you would sacrifice but how do you decide IF you even choose to save 7 billion people. Would you? Could you? M. Night has no answers but worse, he didn’t seem interested in even posing possibilities for the audience to chew on while he puts his characters through the wringers of a moral dilemma or at least making the audience even question the moral integrity of the so-called protagonists.
Everything is handled in such a passive, predictable kinda way that it loses steam really fast during the back half of the flick so by the time they get down to decision time, the interest in the resolution is as thin as the characters motivations.
Knock at the Cabin is a middle-of-the-pack M. Night film with a solid cast, a stellar idea, and a decent set-up, but it fails to sink its teeth into the issues it’s trying to convey.
Lover of movies and tacos. Ad man. Author. Member of the Kansas City Film Critics Circle and the Broadcast Film Critics Association. Founder of the Terror on the Plains Horror Festival. Creator and voice of the Reel Hooligans podcast.
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