This apocalyptic thriller is a disappointingly mediocre M. Night Shyamalan offering, a very silly movie that takes itself way too seriously and is neither great nor memorably awful.
I’ll at least give the movie props for getting into the meat of the story straight away. A little girl named Wen (Kristen Cui) is playing alone in the woods, when she’s approached by a big, bald, tattooed mountain of a man, who despite his appearance gives off a vibe of a gentle giant. Leonard (Dave Bautista) is soon joined by three more strangers, all carrying sinister-looking weapons. Their attention is set on the cabin where Wen’s two dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), are hanging out, unaware that their family holiday is about to get very weird and violent.
After a brief and unsuccessful resistance, the intruders tie Eric and Andrew to a chair and patiently explain their purpose. The end of the world is near, they say, and the only way to save billions of lives from the incoming floods, plagues and fire raining down from the sky is for this family to make an impossible choice and sacrifice one of their own. The four visitors cannot harm or force the family in any way, and in order to show just how serious they are, they’ll sacrifice each other one by one every time Eric and Andrew refuse to make a decision.
This moral dilemma could be genuinely intriguing, especially in the context of a same-sex couple where the usual chivalrous code wouldn’t apply. The situation however is so wildly outlandish and preposterous that the movie ends up spending very little time on the agonising choice. Instead it focuses on the question of whether, contrary to all appearances and common sense, the captors are not crazy cultists from an online echo chamber, and the apocalypse is happening for real. Apart from their sheer persuasive fanaticism, there’s convenient news footage on TV showing giant tsunami waves and nasty virus outbreaks. Is it all just one massive coincidence?
It is very rare that I find myself thinking that a movie could benefit from more graphic violence, yet that bizarrely was my feeling every time one of the intruders got bludgeoned to death and Shyamalan’s camera discreetly cut away just in time. “Bloodless” is how I would describe this overly serious and decidedly unscary film overall. It doesn’t want to have any fun with its ridiculous premise while also failing to be unintentionally funny. I even found myself missing Shyamalan’s trademark stilted dialogue that made movies like Old so perversely entertaining.
Dave Bautista is easily the highlight of the movie, bringing an unsettling mix of gentle earnestness and menace to the former second-grade teacher turned a Horseman of Apocalypse (I groaned when the film actually spelled it out loud, clearly not trusting the viewers to make the connection by themselves). Even when he’s bashing in somebody’s skull, Leonard is never anything less than courteous, soft-spoken and polite.
The rest of the cast don’t make much of an impression, save perhaps for Rupert Grint’s over-the-top mugging as an intruder with a possible personal link to the couple. Groff and Aldridge do their best to breathe in some emotion into Eric and Andrew and their entirely sexless relationship, but there’s only so much actors can do with characters lacking in dimension and believable motivations. Early on, the movie briefly hints on Eric hanging on to his religious beliefs, then remains strangely light on religion despite the obvious nods to the Book of Revelation. Say what you will about those old Omen movies, they were scary and effective even to a non-believer precisely because they put the Bible front and centre.
Knock at the Cabin is still perfectly watchable. The pacing is brisk, the cinematography makes the most of the limited setting, and Shyamalan does a decent job building up the suspense, even if it all ultimately leads to a big fat anticlimax that doesn’t earn its emotions. It’s just frustrating to see a movie with an intriguing premise stuck firmly in the mid territory.
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