Just the Ticket #123: Knock At the Cabin

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. Sherlock Shyamalan.

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In the past, we had amazing Shyamalan twists like (SPOILERS!) Bruce Willis being dead the whole time, Bruce Willis being a superhero, aliens being deathly allergic to religion, baseball bats, and water, The Village being a highly secluded, modern-day, pagan-Amish community, the Devil killing people in an elevator because the director's jellied toast landed facedown, nature making people commit suicide, and The Last Airbender being terrible.

And then, there's Knock At the Cabin: an adaptation of the novel, The Cabin At the End Of the World by Paul G. Tremblay. A same-sex couple (played by Mindhunters' Jonathan Groff and Fleabag's Ben Aldridge) and their adopted daughter, Wen (the highlight of the film, played by Kristen Cui, and having the most ironic name since Liv in Scream 5), are spending a weekend at a cabin in the woods when a bug-catcher in white, a nurse in yellow, a foodie in dark blue, and an angry man in red hold them hostage with admittedly cool-looking homemade polearm weapons ("tools," the huge bug-catching basketball coach calls them). These four are Leonard (Guardians Of the Galaxy's Dave Bautista), Sabrina (Coriolanus' Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane (Little Women's Abby Quinn), and the uncreatively named Redmond (Harry Potter's Ron Weasley himself, Rupert Grint), and they say that the family must choose among themselves which one to kill, or their four captors will kill themselves off one at a time, claiming that the family's indecision will doom humanity to suffer one global disaster for each captor who dies (most of these deaths happen offscreen!).

It took a lot for me to get the wording of that clarified in print (I hope it's clear, anyway) because I spent at least ten minutes explaining to my family which of the characters were supposed to kill each other and why. Clarity of plot is a subjective problem, but a problem is still a problem, so call that a mark against it. Also, Leonard says that the family members cannot commit suicide. But apparently, volunteering to be the sacrifice doesn't count?

As the four captors die one by one (an almost brilliant reversal of horror movie conventions) and the world is incrementally overcome by floods, crickets, a pandemic, global plane crashes, lightning storms, and all-encompassing darkness, doubt is cast on their true purpose and the biblically obvious twist by way of commentary on homophobia, the effect of individual rights on the welfare of the many, conspiracy theories, religious cults, mass hallucination phenomena, grey morality, and everything else that has made the world a terrible place for the past three-plus years. Add to that the formulaic, "captured 'good guys' try everything to free themselves from the 'bad guys'" beats of the film and the "real people don't talk like this" Shyamalogue line delivery, and Knock At the Cabin becomes far less interesting than the shared universe it subtly implies. The rock formations shown in the flooding scene look similar to those on the beach in Old. The wind blows through the trees when Leonard's three companions show up, nodding at The Happening. The crashing planes, handful of references to suicide, and the pandemic hint at further connections to Old (perhaps the scientists were secretly testing a cure for the virus) and the mass suicides in The Happening. The four's visions of the end, and the scene where the couple trap Leonard in their bathroom, hint that Signs might also be taking place at this time (or it's the same set?), and because it also has religious connotations and four people dying one-by-one, why not throw Devil in there, too? Was The Village trying to keep away from the modern world, thinking that its citizens would be spared from The End? I'm probably stretching, but these are the thoughts I have when I'm clawing for interest in a movie that has none to spare.

That is, until the end.

This isn't one of those "the movie was so bad that the best part was when it was over" trope lines; the final scene between the two survivors was a perfect, "less is more," "show, don't tell" experience with no dialogue and masterful physical acting.

I won't spoil the outcome for those who haven't seen Knock At the Cabin yet, and I can't speak to its faithfulness to the book because I haven't read it, but I know just enough about the Bible (and the X-Men, and "When the Man Comes Around" by Johnny Cash) to have figured out the twist based on what the four are wearing and what they do for a living, and I don't care if I spoil that. Leonard is Pestilence, Adriane is Famine, Redmond is War, and Sabrina is Death. Unfortunately, the disasters their deaths unleash make no sense with which Horsemen they are written to represent, falling more in line with the Ten Plagues Of Egypt, and "Daddy Eric"'s...optimistic explanation of what the Horsemen represent makes even less sense.

Cool-looking weapons tools, interesting horror subversion and shared universe implications, semi-competent social commentary (alliteration!), and an impactful ending, but everything else was too safe and nonsensical in its execution for me to give a better-than-average (or even average) recommendation. Plus I spoiled the twist for you that I figured out fifteen minutes into Knock At the Cabin's hour-forty runtime. I guess it didn't piss me off that much, so....

C-