Knock all you want, no one’s home in Shyamalan’s latest
“Knock at the Cabin” is a real load — 100 lugubrious minutes of what is intended as steadily mounting dread and apocalypse prevention seminar.
It’s frustrating because writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has made seriously good films and some that go splat. With every new project, millions of moviegoers have a way of holding out hope based on his best efforts, and the luck of the draw.
This one comes from the 2018 Paul Tremblay novel “The Cabin at the End of the World,” and there are moments when the adaptation by Shyamalan, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman — the filmmaker wrote his version based on Desmond and Sherman’s script — feels as if it might be getting somewhere, albeit slowly. The acting’s quite good. But there is more to filmmaking and storytelling than what the actors can do.
In a remote corner of the Pennsylvania woods, married dads Eric and Andrew are vacationing with their young daughter, Wen. Straight off, trouble: As Wen collects grasshoppers in a jar, the girl spies a large man nearby, coming closer.
This is Dave Bautista as Leonard, who weasels his way past Wen’s reluctance to talk to strangers. In his tightly coiled murmur, he mentions that he and three others will be paying a visit to her fathers very soon. They have an important decision to make, he says.
This they do, very early in the movie that wastes no time and yet wastes an awful lot of it in other ways. Leonard’s soon joined by his associates, nurse Sabrina (Nikki
Amuka-Bird), hotheaded ex-con Redmond (Rupert Grint) and restaurant cook Ardiane (Abby Quinn). Except for Redmond, they’re all sympathetic to their captives, even though they carry fearsome-looking homemade weapons. Leonard and company bust their way into the cabin and begin their little pitch, explaining to the soontied-up-and-gagged family the situation: One of the three must be sacrificed to prevent a global apocalypse.
Leonard and his group have been afflicted with shared “visions” of earthquakes, planes dropping out of the sky and such. They’ve been guided intuitively to this cabin to fulfill their grim but Earthsaving destiny. Are they garden-variety doomsdayers? Or legit portents of Earth’s final credits?
The movie is part passive-aggressive home invasion thriller and part world’s-end nightmare. “Knock at the Cabin” weaves in flashbacks of earlier times in the lives of Eric (Jonathan Groff, who was King George in “Hamilton”) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge). One flashback reveals a homophobic hate crime in a bar some years ago; another, the adoption in China of their daughter, played in present-day scenes by Kristen Cui.
It’s a drag to have the whole of Shyamalan’s latest so dependent on young Wen witnessing traumatic yet dramatically thin events in close quarters. “Knock at the Cabin” perpetually seems to be stalling for time, taffy-pulling its simplest set-ups and exchanges in order to tease out meaning and subtext. The suspense doesn’t escalate so much as sidewind. Though there are some nicely realized glimpses of what’s happening in the world as Leonard foretold, the story’s core, the family under siege, struggles to get a foothold.
In the end, you’re stuck with a hyperbolic no-win allegory of what countless same-sex couples face in America. If it’s not tragically common hate-crime viciousness, it’s the end of the world, as predicted by both the Book of Revelation Bautista.
MPA rating: R (for violence and language)
Running time: 1:40
How to watch: In theaters