Eric and Andrew just wanted to get away. When the married couple at the center of M. Night Shyamalan’s new thriller, Knock at the Cabin, took their daughter to a rustic lodge in the Pennsylvania woods, they hoped to escape the demands of a world that hated them simply for existing. They wanted nothing more than to focus on only themselves.
Even if you haven’t experienced the hate crimes inflicted upon Eric and Andrew, you can probably relate. We’re constantly being overwhelmed with information about crime rates, foreclosures, rising inflation, and other maladies.
But among the many hardships put upon the family in Knock at the Cabin, none are more demanding, or vital, than seeing beyond themselves. No matter how badly they need—and deserve—to ignore everyone else, the movie insists that we’re always connected, always immersed with one another, and always responsible for each other.
Adapted from the Paul Tremblay novel Cabin at the End of the World, Knock at the Cabin begins in the peace of a verdant forest. Surrounded by the greens of a forest clearing illuminated by the sun’s soft glow, little Wen (Kristen Cui) plays without a care in the world, until she’s greeted by a stranger called Leonard. Despite his intimidating physique, Leonard—beefy former wrestler Dave Bautista, in a revelatory performance—exudes meekness, showing nothing but kindness to Wen.
But when he returns later and knocks at the door of the cabin where Wen is staying with her fathers Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), Leonard is terrifying. Accompanied by Redmond (Rupert Grint), Sabrina (Niki Amuka-Bird), and Adriane (Abby Quinn), each of whom wield hideous tools and weapons, Leonard informs the family that he and his associates have been given a vision of a future apocalypse. The only thing that can prevent that calamity is the family choosing to sacrifice one of its members. Each time the family denies the demand, one member of the visiting quartet must be slaughtered, unleashing a plague on the rest of the world.
“Will you choose?” asks Leonard, his voice quivering with both empathy and urgency.
From that premise, director M. Night Shyamalan tells a bleak story about the impossible demands of care.
In many ways, Shyamalan continues the trajectory he started after his fall from grace with infamous flops The Last Airbender and After Earth. The filmmaker, once predicted to be the “next Spielberg” after his breakthrough The Sixth Sense became a sensation in the late 90s, has lately reinvented himself as a first-class schlockmeister—a director who does not shy away from nasty stories and dodgy themes.
But even in his most audacious movies during this most recent run, Shyamalan maintained a striking visual sense and even a heart for soft, humane moments. In 2016’s Split, a ridiculous story about a man with dissociative-identity-disorder (James McAvoy) who kidnaps young women to sacrifice to his latest personality “the Beast,” features a psychiatrist (Betty Buckley) who fights without fear for his dignity and safety. In 2020’s Old, a family finds themselves rapidly aging while trapped on a magical beach. But within its laughable storyline, Shyamalan still pauses for spouses Guy and Prisca (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps) to have a vulnerable and honest conversation about their attachment to each other.
With Knock at the Cabin, Shyamalan brings the heart and character back to the forefront, ahead of the story’s grisliest elements. While the movie never backs away from the bleakness of Leonard’s requests, nor of the horrors being unleashed on the rest of the world as the family fights for any other option, it remains resolutely, shockingly compassionate. For all of their prophetic language, Leonard and his compatriots act more like desperate parents than wild-eyed doomsayers.
Playing against type, Bautista exudes gentleness and kindness, well aware that he knows what he asks of Eric and Andrew and despairing that there is no other way. When he and the other members of the quartet arrive with their news, they begin by telling their captives who they are, their names and occupations, and their passions. When the (reasonably) baffled couple responds with incredulity, Leonard explains: it’s important that they see each other as people.
For all of its focus on the faces of people in our presence, Knock at the Cabin never forgets people all over the world, the people whom we will never see but will affect.
More so than the movie’s greatest thrills or most upsetting scenes, this emphasis on humanity is the most enduring element of Knock at the Cabin. Working with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke (a frequent collaborator of director Robert Eggers, he shot The Lighthouse and The Northman), Shyamalan uses extreme close-ups of characters’ faces to train the attention of viewers on the characters’ responding to each other’s expressions. As if channeling postmodern philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who saw the human face as the site of ethics because it shows the vulnerability and complexity in a person, Shyamalan’s visual style constantly reminds us that no matter what choice Eric and Andrew make, other people will be affected.
It’s this emphasis on others that drives one of the movie’s most chillingly familiar moments. After the husbands’ first rejection of Leonard’s request, the quartet ritualistically sacrifices one of their members, thus unleashing a plague on the world. “Part of humanity has been judged,” intones Leonard as he delivers the killing strike. As Eric and Andrew try to register their shock and anger at the invaders for subjecting their family to an unspeakable horror, Leonard quietly turns on the television.
A news report interrupts the broadcast, informing the viewers of several typhoons hitting the coast of the United States and other countries. From their quiet secluded cabin, both the family and the invaders watch video of other people drowning, dying, running for their lives. All because Leonard and his friends couldn’t be persuasive, all because Eric and Andrew would not choose.
Unlike Shyamalan’s previous movie Old, Knock at the Cabin draws no explicit parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic. But with the pandemic still raging on, threatening at any moment to reach its destructive heights again, we viewers cannot help but recall the stories about people contracting the disease from the most unusual of sources, often because someone wouldn’t make the choice to get the jab or wear a mask.
To be clear, Eric and Andrew have nothing in common with most of the anti-vax crowd (well, save for one decision made by Andrew and revealed relatively late in the movie, but even that is understandable, if not condoned). As Leonard makes clear, whatever mysterious force drives the universe (despite its pseudo-biblical language, the movie never pins the calamities on any one deity) chose the family precisely because they love so purely. And from a thematic level, but not from a moral level, it makes sense that the innocent family would be forced to make ahorrible decision for the sake of a world that has so often hated them.
For all of its focus on the faces of people in our presence, Knock at the Cabin never forgets people all over the world, the people whom we will never see but will affect. For Americans in particular, this is a salient, urgent point. Even as we continue to battle hatred in our own country and America’s legacy of enslavement and genocide, even as we exercise self-care and understand that, for many of us, survival is resistance, our actions affect the entire world. We must choose to care.