M. Night Shyamalan checks into terror with ‘Cabin’
For M. Night Shyamalan, “Knock at the Cabin,” his latest puzzle of mystery and menace, was irresistible.
A hulking stranger (David Bautista) appears in a peaceful forest and meets a little girl (Kristen Cui) collecting grasshoppers in a jar, creating immediate tension and dread.
Soon there are four strangers demanding to get inside the cabin where the girl is staying with her two dads (Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge).
Shyamalan, 52, found his subject in Paul Tremblay’s novel “The Cabin at the End of the World.” “I thought it was a very clever subversion of the genre with the combination of two very important genres: The home invasion genre and then the end of the world genre, which are playing on two separate fears of ours. Dovetailing those two genres together,” he said earlier this week in a Zoom interview, “was quite smart.”
The gay couple at the center of this story was in Tremblay’s novel and Shyamalan cast two “out” gay actors in the roles. “It was always that couple. I think one of the great things about that is that the movie kind of has an attitude about it. That’s not what the movies about, and that’s not what the story is about, but it’s very interesting that they are them — for a lot of plot reasons.
“But,” he emphasized, “it’s just a family and you should be able to see your family in this family. There’s no lectures, there’s nothing different. Same type of power of love, the same type of parenting love. So I saw that in them.
I saw that, I saw my own family and their family.”
In a movie with a pervasive sense of gloomy tension, there’s a comical moment with the filmmaker’s cameo, his Hitchcock-style tradition of briefly appearing in his movies.
“At first I was like, ‘There’s just no way I can participate in this movie’ — because it takes place in a cabin.
“Then it was a very offthe-cuff idea. ‘Maybe I could do this — and then everyone in that crew and cast were like, ‘You’ve got to do that. That’s hilarious.’ Then I was like, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ It was really the first thing that we shot. Let’s just get this out of the way. I mean, this is such a silly thing I’m doing and then I had so much fun doing it.
“I didn’t even think about it for months and months, until the editor put it in. She felt it was a very funny and additive thing to the story.”