Knock at the Cabin Review :: Knock at the Cabin makes an apocalyptic promise

Universal Pictures

Is it fair to compare a piece of art to the artist’s career at large? Sure, it’s good, but it’s no Mona Lisa. He painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on his back. It doesn’t have the same intensity as his 5th Symphony.

Is it fair to say that Spielberg landed a little flat with The Post when he made Saving Private Ryan? We’ve seen misses from Sofia Coppola and Spike Lee and Cameron Crowe, should we compare them to The Virgin Suicides or Do the Right Thing or Almost Famous?

Such is the discourse any time we are graced with a new film from M. Night Shyamalan. There are expectations. There’s a high bar. There’s a sense of anticipation. There’s an agreement that his work is part of a separate canon of film, one that can only be compared to the other films within it. The problem is: I’m not sure he’s produced an output worthy of that distinction. For every hit, of which there are only a few, he’s misfired a handful of times. At best, he’s a Mendoza hitter. At worst, the flashes are just that, a flash, lightning in a bottle.

His work is, however, highly singular. His voice is distinct. And those expectations come from a track record of sorts. There are two types of M. Night movies: the twist and the promise. We are all familiar with the twist. Everybody on the planet knows how The Sixth Sense turned out and he’s gone back to that well in movies like The Village and The Visit with varying levels of success. Then there’s the promise: The premise promises some crazy stuff and we buy a ticket to see if he delivers. How is James McAvoy going to play 23 characters in one body? How will he make a superhero movie without superheroes? How are people going to get old on this beach?

The promise in this one is simple: the apocalypse.

Eric, Andrew, and their daughter, Wen, are on vacation at a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere. When four strangers descend upon their rental property, they force their way in, but seem to be … nice about it? Apologetic? It’s a home invasion where the invaders don’t want to invade. The trespassers don’t want to hurt them — they want them to hurt each other.

The proposition: The world is ending … unless. Unless you three can decide to sacrifice one of you. If you can do that, everyone lives. If you can’t, everyone on the planet, except you three, dies.

The quartet (played by Dave Bautista, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn, and Rupert Grint) spend the film trying to convince the family by speaking of the shared visions they’ve seen, gathering any proof they have, and making sacrifices of their own. They understand it’s a tall order and an impossible decision. They also see that it’s going to take a lot of convincing.

So will the film deliver on that promise? That warning? It’s important to remember that not all Shyamalan movies have twist endings, but the promise is what drives the tension here. Is the world really going to end?

Bautista leads the pack of doomsdayers and gives a career-best performance to convince the family (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge with support from the young Kristen Cui as their daughter) of his premonition. Anyone with eyes can see that Bautista is big and scary — he’s 6’4″ and his chiseled, tattooed body weighs in at nearly 300 pounds — but he uses his size for great juxtaposition here. His character is a 2nd-grade teacher who coaches the mediocre after-school basketball teams. He’s a loving, caring person who is here because he wants to save lives, not end them. His Glass Onion director Rian Johnson has gone on record agreeing that Bautista is the greatest wrestler-to-actor ever and although I’m not sure I agree with that just yet, this performance makes the case that it could be true sooner rather than later. He is a highlight of the film. Pardon, he is the highlight of the film.

Unfortunately, the M. Night of it all still gets in the way. It’s often either silly or melodramatic with few shades in between, another mainstay of his career. Perhaps thinking of Shyamalan as an auteur doesn’t quite apply to this film as it’s both based on the book The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay and co-written with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, but four minds are not necessarily better than one and whatever contributions come from those writers are shrouded in the idiosyncrasies often found in M. Night’s work.

His resume is clearly quite divided and I most often fall on the unfortunate side of that divide, with this being no exception. I will see every single one of his wacky movies because I appreciate the chutzpah behind risking it all on a twist or delivering on a big promise, but I will rarely walk away satisfied.

Knock at the Cabin has a run time of 1 hour 40 minutes, and is rated R for violence and language.