The big twist regarding Knock at the Cabin, the latest film from M. Night Shyalmalan, is that it doesn’t contain one of the berserk twist endings that he has become (in)famous for since becoming a household name with the enormous success of The Sixth Sense. Granted, that may be more due to the fact that The Cabin at the End of the World, the Paul Tremblay novel that he and co-writers Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman have adapted, did not contain a big final twist either and attempting to shoehorn one in might have been more trouble than it was worth. (That said, there are several key differentiations between the book and the movie that might not sit well with fans of the former.) I suppose that the lack of any last-second rug-pulling may disappoint some of Shyamalan’s fans—I guess such people still exist—but my guess is that viewers will have checked out long before the finale of this film, which takes a nominally intriguing premise and presents it in the most stultifying manner imaginable before arriving at a conclusion that tries to be intriguingly ambiguous but which comes off as being kind of silly instead.
As the film begins, Wen (Kristen Cui), an eight-year-old Chinese-American girl, is playing outside of the remote cabin in the woods where she is staying with her adoptive parents, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), when a literal mountain of a man approaches her. This is Leonard (Dave Bautista) and while he tries—possibly too hard—to come across as gentle while talking to her, the things he is saying causes her to freak and run inside to warn her dads. Before long, Leonard is knocking at the door, now backed by three associates—Redmond (Rupert Gint), Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and Adriane (Abby Quinn—who are all wielding weird-looking weapons, and politely asking to be let in to discuss something of grave importance. Before too long, the politeness slips away and the four break in and, following a brief struggle, tie up Eric and Andrew.
This sounds like the set-up for a Funny Games-style home invasion thriller but that notion quickly goes out the window once the eerily patient and polite group begin to explain what is happening. They claim that they have each received visions about the impending apocalypse that have brought them together and led them to the cabin. According to these visions, they need to convince the inhabitants, whom they supposedly do not know, that the only way to stave off the end of the world is if Eric, Andrew and Wen offer one of themselves as a voluntary sacrifice.
No, Leonard and the others cannot choose for them or do the killing or do anything to overtly force their hand. What they can do is, if they fail to make a choice, gruesomely dispatch one of themselves, a move that supposedly unleashes some kind of horrible destruction upon the world until time runs out and humanity is doomed. Naturally, Andrew and Eric assume that the interlopers are some kind of weird religious cult that is targeting them because they are gay—not without good reason, as it turns out—but as time passes and increasingly strange things begin happening throughout the world, the notion that the story that Leonard and the others is telling might actually be true slowly moves into the realm of being an actual possibility.
As a premise for a thriller dealing with notions of fate, free will and the nature of sacrifice, Knock at the Cabin is not without interest in theory but in Shyamalan’s hands, the execution pretty much completely falls apart. Since going into too much detail in regards to the particulars would find us drifting into spoiler territory, I will avoid doing that. Suffice it to say, none of the potentially provocative issues brought up by the film are explored in what even the most lenient viewers might consider to be a satisfactory manner. The big conflict at the center of the story—whether the apocalyptic scenes that are supposedly the result of Eric and Andrew’s refusal to choose one of them for sacrifice are real or just a coincidence or stagecraft created by the invaders—is more tedious than tense, building up to a finale (one considerably different from the more provocative one in the book)that is simply not very effective.
Rendering the action even more inert is the overly fussy and mannered way in which everyone speaks throughout. Granted, Shyamalan has never been known for creating dialogue that you could imagine actual people saying in real life but he definitely outdoes himself here—the characters sound like they learned to read and communicate with the help of stereo installation instructions and the zonked-out rhythms become so prevalent that it feels as if they were all smacked in the head with boards just before the cameras started rolling.
As crummy and laughable as the film is, there are still a couple of elements to Knock at the Cabin that are reasonably commendable. Even at their lamest, Shyamalan’s films—with the obvious exception of The Last Airbender—have generally tended to be fairly impressive in terms of the visuals and this one is no exception, which is a not inconsiderable achievement when you consider that much of the narrative is restricted to the inside of the cabin. The film also presents some interesting work from Dave Bautista in his biggest and most straightforwardly dramatic acting performance to date. Although the guy is obviously a physical mammoth, he delivers a quietly introspective performance that presents a nice contrast to his undeniably imposing presence. Granted, not even he is able to do much with the woozy dialogue he is obligated to recite but he comes a lot closer to making it sound plausible than the rest of the cast.
Knock at the Cabin is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination but since it never quite reaches the insulting creative depths of such things as The Village, The Visit and the convulsively idiotic Old, some may look upon it as some kind of minor creative comeback for Shyamalan. It may be better than those films but that does not take away the fact that the entire enterprise is a dull-witted exercise in “What Would YOU Do?” narrative hijinks that ends up coming across like a way-too-serious riff on the infinitely better The Cabin in the Woods played at half-speed. The whole thing turns out to be about as gripping and entertaining as actually being stuck in a cabin in the middle of nowhere—in this case, however, you are more likely to die of boredom than Lyme disease.