KNOCK AT THE CABIN

★★ 1/2

R, 100 minutes. Waterford, Lisbon.

It seems that M. Night Shyamalan has the end of days on his mind. In his latest film, he turns toward the apocalypse, or at least the idea of it, in “Knock at the Cabin,” adapted from Paul Tremblay’s 2018 horror novel “The Cabin at the End of the World.” Tremblay’s novel is terrifying in its unpredictability and ambiguity. Structured around a home invasion that takes place over the course of a couple of days, it explores the ways in which a stunning amount of suffering can occur if someone believes enough in their mission, misguided or not. “Knock at the Cabin,” adapted by Shyamalan, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, is faithful to the source material until it is not, because this wouldn’t be a Shyamalan movie without his own original take on the ending. There are no better actors to play the main trio than Ben Aldridge, Jonathan Groff and Dave Bautista, who tear into these challenging roles with an emotional and technical rigor. The rest of the small cast is uniformly excellent, including the incredible Kristen Cui in her first film role. Cui plays Wen, the young adopted daughter of Andrew (Aldridge) and Eric (Groff). She’s catching grasshoppers outside their remote lakeside vacation rental when a strange person approaches. Leonard (Bautista) seems to be a gentle giant, but soon he’s intoning scary promises about hard choices that will shortly need to be made. She scurries inside and her dads lock the doors, but the quartet of Leonard, Redmond (Rupert Grint), Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and Adriane (Abby Quinn) make their way in nevertheless, in order to present the family with a choice: sacrifice one of their own, or watch the apocalypse unfold.