Knock At The Cabin (2023) Taken from Paul Tremblay's startling little horror novel, "The Cabin At The End Of The World", M. Night Shyamalan's movie starts out like the start of a long, long twisted joke.....
You know the kind.....one of those endless tall-tale anecdotes that takes 15 minutes to slog its way to an eventual punchline......
So instead of "a priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar", we have, "Four sick, crazy shitheads walk in on two gay dads in a remote vacation cabin with their 8 year old adopted Asian daughter"
The cult-like shitheads, led by gentle, soft-spoken man-mountain Leonard (Dave Bautista) shared a vision of a Biblical sized apocalypse Their visions came complete with tsunamis, plagues, planes dropping out the skies and the whole world bursting into flame. Yikes.
Comprising the rest of this jolly quartet are a pissed off thug (Rupert Grint), and two young women, (Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn),obviously as weak-minded and true-believing as Trump supporters......(all of them wielding lethal handmade weapons crafted from garden tools according to God's Ikea-like instructions in their visions')
But God (God bless 'im) offered an escape clause...... if the gay dads (Jonathon Groff, Ben Aldridge) and daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) willingly agree to take one for Team Humanity and sacrifice one of themselves, God will cancel the End Of Days...oh joy, yay us. ..
The dads, tied to chairs by Len and company, naturally, ain't buyin' this crapola. This forces Len and the gang to start executing each other, just to show the little family how their refusal to go along, brings on tidal waves, plagues, yada yada... The four horses asses of the apocalypse slaughter themselves via those Ikea weapons handed down by heavenly Big G. Himself.
More tragic carnage ensues, sometimes interrupted by flashback to the trials and tribulations of the gay dads)......and here's where Shyamalan makes his fatal error, tossing out Paul Tremblay's third act for his own.....
Shyamalan, sensing he'd leave a foul, sour taste in an audience's mouth with Tremblay's more horrific, inconclusive wrap-up, attempts an ending that wants it every which way. You can sense his desperation to leave you unsettled but somehow soothed and satisfied......
Instead of the director's trademark twist endings that he attaches to his own original screenplays, he allows "Knock At The Cabin" to play out as it was pre-written for him by the Universal Studios marketing department, focus group screenings and CEO's of movie theater chains.......
I suppose that'll insure Shyamalan that he'll get another movie to direct......but it leaves his film with an unsurprising, connect-the-dots structure.......and if there's not one single twist in store, you'll start to wonder why you wasted time watching such a wacky story to begin with.......
Bur let me hail two huge pluses here.......
First - even when his scripts turn ridiculous, Shyamalan remains a superb visualist and a modern master of what Hitchcock called 'pure cinema'.... every single shot's masterfully composed for maximum impact. This guy, like Spielberg and Scorsese, knows the power of edited imagery and how to to use it to his best advantage.
Second - the positively jaw-dropping, award-worthy performance of Dave Bautista, an actor only previously used for his sheer, threatening bulk. He manages to pull off a tightrope trick I've seen very few actors accomplish........he breaks your heart and scares the hell out of you all at the same time. Who knew there was a actor lurking underneath those ten layers of muscle?
For these two reasons - Shyamalan's meticulous filmmaking expertise and Bautista's extraordinary work, I'm probably handing out 1/2 a star more than this movie deserves. Together, these two guys cobble together a still watchable film even stuck with a loony premise and a blatant, cornball Hollywood-ized finale. Proceed at your own risk. 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)
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