For years, M. Night Shyamalan has made films that feel more or less like sprawling, not terribly successful episodes of "The Twilight Zone." Lots of twisty endings, dripping with ironies, and shocking revelations that force you (if you care) to re-evaluate everything you've just seen in a different light.
That his movies haven't been very good, or terribly well-crafted, or indeed, about anything much at all in particular other than as vehicles to deliver those twists, seems beside the point: You don't go to his films expecting much more than a jolt or two in the first place. He's the master of the movie that makes for a perfect elevator pitch, but goes on to play like a rickety step ladder.
"Knock at the Cabin" offers a bit more promise at first (it helps, I have to say, that Shyamalan is only one of the credited screenwriters, along with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman), if only because it's not immediately obvious how it's going to operate. One morning, four strangers appear at the door of a cabin, where a family is vacationing, and make them a horrifying proposition: Either they choose to sacrifice one of themselves, at the others' hand, or the world will end.
Naturally, the family -- dad, Eric (Jonathan Groff), other dad, Andrew (Ben Aldridge), and 7-year-old adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) -- refuse to comply with this request at first, but with each refusal, one of the four disparate strangers -- Leonard (Dave Bautista), a teacher from Chicago; Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a nurse from California; Redmond (Rupert Grint), a gas technician from Massachusetts; and Ardiane (Abby Quinn), a line-cook from D.C. -- lays down their homemade weapon, and allows themselves to be executed by the others.
Meanwhile, as per Leonard's dire prediction, when one of them dies thusly, humanity appears to be hit with a devastating plague as a result: A deadly tsunami causes widespread destruction on various coasts; a pandemic begins to rage uncontrollably; planes drop from the sky, raining fire and devastation on the ground below. At least, this is what the family gets to see after Leonard helpfully switches on the news for them.
Quite the dilemma, that is if, as with the sensitive, more open-minded Eric, you believe there's anything to what these deranged would-be prophets are saying. For feisty Andrew, however, it's clearly the result of the exact kind of mass psychosis we've seen deep in the bowels of conspiracy chat rooms and online forums for years. As the stand-off continues, and the strangers' body count begins to rise, things on Earth seemingly get worse and worse, until Eric and Andrew are finally forced to take a stand together.
OUTLANDISH PREMISE
By placing such an outlandish premise into a "real-world" context (Shyamalan creates his tableau, in part, by adding various flashbacks from the life together of the loving couple, including their decision to adopt, their trip to China to pick up Wen, and, eventually, a brutal beatdown they endured at the hands of a drunken lout at a bar), we are clearly meant to take the enterprise very seriously, even as seeds of doubt are somewhat clumsily scattered before us. For one thing, who are these people, and how, exactly, did they come to be plagued by the same visions of armageddon? For another, why do the news broadcasts seem so fake, with instant, full-camera video feeds showing us exactly what's happening virtually the moment Leonard announces it?
To take that last example, the "footage" -- one extended clip displays a beach somewhere that suddenly gets hit with a terrifying 50-foot wave, another, from a balcony shows a series of planes dropping from the sky like so many leaves from a tree, before exploding on the ground -- clearly shot with movie cameras as opposed to homemade cellphone footage -- despite the first-person POV window-dressing -- is pretty clearly inauthentic, or at least, hugely unrealistic, a point, to the film's credit, Andrew tries to bring up.
The stilted, on-the-nose coverage does appear to be somehow recorded, as Eric keeps suggesting, but that line of inquiry goes nowhere, and eventually the film ignores it altogether. It's as if Shyamalan decided to shoot the would-be plagues in this manner first, then figured out it didn't look real, and had one of the characters point this out as if to acknowledge the clear inaccuracy as a means of further casting doubt on the strangers' story, even though no explanation is ever given.
CHARACTER, PLOT HOLES
It's this consistent lack of attention to detail that has always plagued the director, and reduced the effectiveness of his work. I have written this complaint before, but much of his strong visual storytelling (the same component that, early in his career, got him routinely compared to Spielberg) is consistently undermined by scripts that read as if penned by a particularly enterprising high school freshman. Nobody in his films acts the way actual humans do, and gaping plot holes are often simply ignored so that we can move on with what Shyamalan clearly thinks is his super-cool premise.
Since the film is so bereft at portraying anything that feels genuine or realistic -- apart from everything else, the strangers bloody sacrifices happen directly in front of the rope-bound family, but after a brief, hollowed-out moment or two, everyone seems pretty unfazed -- the film loses any verite-type bite, and again galumphs into a kind of cartoonland, where the vast majority of the director's work ultimately resides.
In this way, with his films, it always feels less of a choice than a kind of acceptance. For all the good Shyamalan can do with a camera -- there's an effectively fun moment during a fistfight where the camera sways back and forth with the combatants, for but one example, -- he undermines himself with a created world in which everyone seems thoroughly unconvincing and pretty dopey. The family is tasked with saving the world with their sacrifice, but as angry Andrew puts it, they're all horrible, ignorant people anyway.
In the Shyamalan-land of weird doofuses, at least, he might well have a point.
‘Knock at the Cabin’
78 Cast: Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Kristen Cui, Abby Quinn, Rupert Grint
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Playing theatrically
Family affair: Andrew (Ben Aldridge) Eric (Jonathan Groff) and their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) have their vacation interrupted by prophets of doom in “Knock at the Cabin.”