Knock at the Cabin (2023)

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Dave Bautista, Ben Aldridge, Jonathan Groff, Kristen Cui, Abby Quinn, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rupert Grint. [R]

Four strangers arrive at a cabin in the woods occupied by a vacationing family, break in, and inform them with a heavy heart that they’ve had visions of the end of the world, and in order to prevent it from happening, one member of the family will need to sacrifice his or her self. A straight-faced and self-serious thriller requiring an enormous leap of faith from the viewer, but it’s not tightly-wound or intriguing enough to forgive its many flaws and logic gaps. Certainly not the worst attempt by M. Night Shyamalan to tackle apocalyptic events, but too boring to even be enjoyed as the tin-eared schlock he typically gives us. Leading the pack of intruders—clumsily symbolizing (or, worse, maybe literally representing?) the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Bautista is even almost compelling as an enigmatic and foreboding figure, psychologically tormented yet resolute on a level of cult-like reprogramming. But Shyamalan fails to marry the global catastrophe to the intimate dilemmas in a plausible or reactive fashion, resulting in the whole thing feeling like a shrug of a nightmare, entirely lacking in the suspense and emotion the filmmaker must have believed he was tapping into. The camerawork dulls the senses instead of exciting them, trading off on close-ups and distracting Dutch angles during the setup, and later showing us too much while being frustratingly discreet in terms of gore and mass destruction. It may be a little better than some of the director’s recent movies, but it’s also his least involving and/or unintentionally funny since After Earth. Like Old, the screenplay is based on an outside source (Paul G. Tremblay’s book, “The Cabin at the End of the World”). Shyamalan’s token onscreen cameo is mercifully brief, showing up for a few seconds in an infomercial plug.

36/100