Film Review: M Night Shymalan's Knock at the Cabin is improbable, but gripping

Knock at the Cabin, directed by M Night Shyamalan

• Knock at the Cabin
• ★★★★☆

It’s fair to say that M. Night Shyamalan has a chequered career, but even as he veered from the sublime The Sixth Sense (1999) to the ridiculous The Last Airbender (2010), Shyamalan was always trying to offer something different. 

Knock at the Cabin (15A) delivers a typically inexplicate Shyamalan opening: vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods, Andrew (Ben Aldridge), Eric (Jonathan Groff) and their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) are terrified by a home invasion led by Leonard (Dave Bautista), who is the spokesman for a quartet carrying crude but fearsome weapons. 

Leonard, however, is surprisingly polite and deferential, and is even apologetic as he informs his captives that they have been chosen to perform ‘the most important job in the history of the world.’ To say much more would be to blunder into spoiler territory: suffice to say that Leonard’s captives are not only presented with an impossible moral dilemma, but one that appears to defy logic. 

Shyamalan, who directs and co-writes, has fun playing with the tropes, opening with what appears to be a typical slasher-horror in which Bautista initially presents as a hulking brute who contrasts sharply with the rational Andrew and Eric, who cower before a vast bookshelf chock-a-block with intellectual tomes, before developing his cariactures into rather more interesting characters, and especially when Leonard starts preaching what sounds like a 21st century take on the Book of Revelations. 

An extended metaphor for climate change and impending apocalypse, Knock at the Cabin isn’t one of Shyamalan’s finest films by any stretch of the imagination. But if you’re happy to buy into the wildly improbable scenario – it’s a M. Night Shyamalan movie, after all – it’s a gripping drama throughout, with Dave Bautista, Kristen Cui and Ben Aldridge in particularly good form. (cinema release)