Review: ‘Knock at the Cabin’ twists the home invasion horror
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JAKE COYLE
AP Film Writer
Knock. Knock.
It being mid-winter (typically a doldrums in movie theaters), it’s a cozy relief to be able to throw open the door and find M. Night Shyamalan standing there with his near-annual helping of high-concept thriller. His last one, “Old,” about vacationers trapped on a private beach where aging is accelerated — a kind of high-speed “White Lotus” — fittingly arrived in the summer. But this quieter, gloomier time of year seems perfectly designed for Shyamalan to burst in with his signature brand of big-screen bonkers and some new twists to the age-old question of “Who’s there?”
“Knock at the Cabin,” which opens in theaters Friday, is at once like every previous Shyamalan film and a thrilling departure. Gimmicky set-up? Check. Queasy spiritualism? You bet. But as a self-contained, handsomely staged thriller — after the knocking, the film takes place almost entirely within a remote cabin — Shyamalan’s latest finds the filmmaker working in an appealingly straightforward and stripped-down fashion.
We have our cabin, our small cast of characters and, above all, our preposterous premise. Though Shyamalan’s films often flirt with higher powers and existential conundrums, nothing reigns in his movie universe more than The Concept. And in the gripping “Knock at the Cabin,” he carefully teases it, exploits it and dutifully follows it to its ultimate conclusion with the command of a seasoned professional.
Just outside a cabin in a wooded forest, 7-year-old Gwen (Kristen Cui) is collecting grasshoppers in a glass jar. “I’m just going to learn about you for a while,” she tells one as she slides it into the jar. Shyamalan, too, is gathering specimens into a hermetically sealed vessel for inquiry. One calmly walks right out of the woods. A hulking, bespectacled man (Dave Bautista) strides up to Gwen, politely introduces himself as Leonard and makes kindly chit chat while occasionally glancing back over his shoulder. Then he says the reason he’s there makes him heartbroken. He describes it as “maybe the most important job in the history of the world.”
Before you exclaim “Podiatry!” Leonard’s job turns out to be a tad more sinister. He and three others, who soon also emerge from the forest, are there, as Leonard patiently lays out, to give Gwen’s parents a choice that will dictate the fate of the world. After forcing their way into the cabin, Leonard — flanked by Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Redmond (Rupert Grint) and Adriane (Abby Quinn) — informs Gwen’s two dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) — that they must make a sacrifice to stave off global apocalypse. Each has come to the cabin after all-consuming visions — like warped versions of those that preoccupy the characters in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” — of the doom that awaits if the family in this random cabin doesn’t, within hours, kill one of themselves.
“Knock at the Cabin,” a Universal Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for violence and language. Running time: 100 minutes. Three stars out of four.
