A twist on home invasion horror
Knock. Knock.
It being mid-winter (typically a doldrums in movie theaters), it’s a cozy relief to be able to throw open the door and find M. Night Shyamalan standing there with his near-annual helping of high-concept thriller. His last one, “Old,” about vacationers trapped on a private beach where aging is accelerated fittingly arrived in the summer. But this quieter, gloomier time of year seems perfectly designed for Shyamalan to burst in with his signature brand of big-screen bonkers and some new twists to the age-old question of “Who’s there?”
“Knock at the Cabin” is at once like every previous Shyamalan film and a thrilling departure. Gimmicky set-up? Check. Queasy spiritualism? You bet. But as a self-contained, handsomely staged thriller — after the knocking, the film takes place almost entirely within a remote cabin — Shyamalan’s latest finds the filmmaker working in an appealingly straightforward and stripped-down fashion.
We have our cabin, our small cast of characters and, above all, our preposterous premise. Though Shyamalan’s films often flirt with higher powers and existential conundrums, nothing reigns in his movie universe more than The Concept. And in the gripping “Knock at the Cabin,” he exploits it and dutifully follows it to its ultimate conclusion.
Just outside a cabin in a wooded forest, 7-year-old Gwen (Kristen Cui) is collecting grasshoppers in a glass jar. Shyamalan, too, is gathering specimens into a hermetically sealed vessel for inquiry. One calmly walks right out of the woods. A hulking, bespectacled man (Dave Bautista) strides up to Gwen, politely introduces himself as Leonard and makes kindly chit chat while occasionally glancing back over his shoulder. Then he says the reason he’s there makes him heartbroken. He describes it as “maybe the most important job in the history of the world.”
Leonard and three others, who soon also emerge from the forest, are there to give Gwen’s parents a choice that will dictate the fate of the world. After forcing their way into the cabin, Leonard informs Gwen’s two dads (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge), that they must make a sacrifice to stave off global apocalypse. Each has come to the cabin after all-consuming visions of the doom that awaits if the family in this random cabin doesn’t, within hours, kill one of themselves.
This isn’t, like last year’s “Barbarian,” another chastening example of the dangers that lurk within the poorly chosen Airbnb. This is a sincere metaphorical proposition. What’s more important: Preserving one’s family or the larger world?
The performances, all around, are convincing, and Shyamalan arrestingly stages the intense standoff as blood begins to spill and calamities, seen on television, mount. The tale, adapted from Paul G. Tremblay’s 2018 novel “The Cabin at the End of the World” with a notable tweak to the ending, cleverly inverts the home invasion thriller.