Worst vacation ever
'Knock at the Cabin' more shtick from Shyamalan
From the master of preposterous setups comes “Knock at the Cabin,” a badly titled film in which soft-spoken giant named Leonard (Dave Bautista, best known as Drax from those “Guardians of the Galaxy” films), knocks at your door like the Big Bad Wolf. Outside the cabin, Leonard first meets a little girl named Wen (the very talented Kristen Cui) as she catches grasshoppers in a jar. Inside the large, book-lined cabin, or more accurately out on the back terrace, are Wen’s two dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff, “Hamilton”) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge, “Pennyworth”). Leonard and his “friends,” including nurse Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird, “The Outfit”), ex-con from Medford Redmond (Rupert Grint of “Harry Potter” fame) and single mother Adriane (a luminous Abby Quinn, “Little Women”) come bearing medieval-looking arms that they have built themselves. They inform Eric and Andrew that the three of them must decide to sacrifice one of their members in order to save the world from, yes, destruction. The victim can be any of the three. But they must choose soon. Knowledge of this imminent disaster and how to avert it came to the disparate members of Leonard’s
team from mysterious “visions.” This, folks, is M. Night Shyamalan’s latest supernatural boondoggle.
Thus, the artist once known as the “new Spielberg,” whose credits include “The Sixth Sense” (1999), “Unbreakable” (2000) and “Signs” 2002) and more recently “Glass” (2019) and “Old” (2021), has become a maker of borderline nonsensical, adult fairy tales. The action starts with the buzzing, chirping and trilling of bugs. The film was adapted by Shyamalan and newcomers Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman based on the acclaimed 2018 novel “The Cabin at the End of the World” by Paul Tremblay. Leonard and company proceed to tie up Eric and Andrew. They tell their captives of the impending apocalypse. The oceans will rise up (on the cabin’s TV, we see a 50-foot tsunami engulf vacationers). Plagues will break out (Been there. Done that.). The skies will fall (Oy). Andrew thinks the strangers might be religious extremists targeting a gay family.
A game that Leonard plays with Wen involving flower petals is a reference to the James Whale’s “Frankenstein” (1931) and a famous scene involving Boris Karloff’s monster and a little village girl. The more combative Andrew owns a gun and has taught himself to fight after being attacked in a bar. Yes, the
film reflects the grim reality of the world we live in with its pandemic, natural disasters and climatechange-driven storms and droughts. And what is this about the Earth’s core going into reverse?
Forever the prankster, Shyamalan will cut from something horrible happening in the film’s “present” to flashbacks of Eric and Andrew first meeting their newborn, adoptive daughter. The auteur, as is his wont, appears in the film as a TV shill (the joke is on us). We hear KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes” more than once. Someone gets shot, and, of course, Shyamalan cuts to a flashback of Eric and Andrew on a first date. To the dread-inducing tune of Herdis Stefansdottir’s score, we see planes plummet from the sky. From the artist who has envisioned the world imperiled by ghosts, cannibals, aliens, plants, premature old age and toxic allegories, we now get a gentle giant leading a team of murderous losers. It’s Shyamalan’s latest card trick, and it’s aging, too.
(“Knock at the Cabin” contains extreme violence and profanity)