Review: KNOCK AT THE CABIN

A little girl in a forest is catching grasshoppers and putting them in a jar. A huge man approaches her and manages with his gentle manner to get quite a lot of information from her, including the names of her two dads. He tells her his heart is broken because of what he has to do. He keeps looking over his shoulder at the trees. Eventually three other figures emerge, carrying weird looking weapons. The girl runs into the cabin and tells her fathers. After a valiant effort at defending their holiday home, the quartet gain entry, subdue the adults and bind them to chairs. The large one tells them they will be asked to sacrifice one of their own or the world will come to an end.

If you can't have a red hot guess at how this ends you might need to start ingesting more fiction. However, this is the latest film from M. Night Shyamalan, king of the twists, so...

In the course of the story everybody gets to know each other a little better but each time they ask again if the captives will sacrifice one of their own they get a firm knock back and prove, through news reports that plagues have resulted from the denial. Themes of purity and bigotry (the parents think they've been targeted by psycho homophobes), true love and sacrifice are rolled out stakes rise as power shifts occur. 

Shyamalan has used a trope that can be fascinating and compelling if handled strongly. The best what-if tale I've seen that posits the Biblical apocalypse as literal is the Spanish horror-comedy Day of the Beast. Comparisons in reviews are generally inappropriate so I'll keep this one short. Knock at the Cabin seeks to suggest the situation's enormity through keeping the scale intimate but really only stays small. Day of the Beast is the opposite, tiny players in a big city with none of the certainty of the ending hanging over them. It leaves the risks sky high. It will depend on your belief in the couple in Cabin and your empathy with them and on the credibility you give to their captors' claims. Both stories draw from the book of Revelation (which doesn't have a twist ending) but only Beast renders it compelling.

That is not to say that Cabin has nothing going for it. It's a solid thriller that will not bore you for a second and will get the adrenalin pumping hard. Shyamalan is, after all, a skilled film maker. But if the twist really is only in a single line of dialogue then the joke's on us for expecting a trademark one. The upshot is that the apocalypse hinges on a whimper not a bang. If, like me, you have no religious feeling whatsoever, you might be profoundly unmoved. I can say the same of the similarly (but nowhere near the same) theistic conclusion of Shyamalan's Signs.

I'd recommend this as a good robust time passer which says a few pleasing things about the importance of everyday sacrifice. But if you don't think the term spiritual is vague and floppy bullshit you might get more out of it.