A twist is, by definition, an unexpected story beat. Anyone watching an M. Night Shyamalan film is likely expecting one—so does that very expectation untangle the twist? Or is twistlessness twisty enough? Such are the worries that accompany the viewing of any Shyamalan film since his textbook masterpiece of an unexpected story beat in The Sixth Sense: can he pull it off again? Should he?
Few other directors have ever found themselves in such a lose-lose dilemma with their own selves. He may have set the bar impossibly high, and will forever be a runner-up to his own reputation. And while he has made a handful of great films in the intervening decades, there have also been a handful of duds. (Looking at you, gently rustling trees.) Still, his skill at translating emotion into imagery is eerily sharp, and he’s a virtuoso of creating and sustaining tension. He’s a master craftsman, and his reputation assures us that we have no idea what he’s about to do. This is a fun way to watch a movie, no matter what happens in the end.
And here’s another twist: the script, by Shyamalan with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, is not an original idea but is based on the work of another master of horror and suspense, Paul G. Tremblay. His 2018 novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, is the source material for Knock at the Cabin. The book sustains an almost unbearable degree of dread for more pages than feel healthy. The only spoiler in this review is that the film doesn’t end quite the same way as the book, but that’s a twist that might elude general audiences. What translates directly from the novel, however, is that pervasive dread. From the opening shots, tension trickles in, and there are very few moments of release after that.
We find a little girl, Wen (Kristen Cui), catching grasshoppers in the woods. Her two dads, Andrew and Eric (Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff), are hanging out on the porch of their vacation cabin where they’re probably not keeping as close an eye on their adopted daughter as they should. But this is the middle of a sunny forest—what could go wrong?
Here comes a strange, hulking man, Leonard (Dave Bautista). He lurks in the trees, and then approaches to speak to her in gentle tones that belie the menace of his look. We get both giant Leonard and tiny Wen in extreme close-up, a technique which hammers each of them into place as the primary and opposing characters. Of course, Leonard’s not here for the grasshoppers, he’s got something else to capture. By the end of the first act, Leonard and his trio of companions confront Wen and her dads with a ridiculous scenario: sacrifice one member of your family, or the world will end.
Who would believe that? In fact, what possible scenario might convince anyone to murder a loved one? With this premise, Shyamalan has staked out difficult but fertile territory to play with his characters’ psychology. Each of Leonard’s companions comes from a different walk of life. Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is a registered nurse from California. Adriane (Abby Quinn) is a short-order cook from D.C. Redmond (Rupert Grint) is a twitchy cable guy with a serious hammer. They don’t seem like typical home invaders; in fact, they seem pretty freaked out themselves, and the score by Herdís Stefánsdóttir makes sure that we feel it.
The camera trades shots of Eric and Andrew listening to the increasingly wacky things these people say about their collective role in preventing the Apocalypse, and it becomes palpable early on that the two dads are made from different stuff. Andrew is fiercely protective and quick to anger while Eric is gentler, more open to suggestion and compromise. For the most part, these qualities are suggested wordlessly in the performances. Close-ups are once again artfully deployed in Jarin Blaschke and Lowell A. Meyer’s cinematography as a way for the audience to practically mind-meld with the characters. But while their emotions are viscerally apparent, their motives remain shadowy. Are the invaders experiencing a mass delusion, or enacting a divine test? Has this little family been targeted because of homophobic bigotry, or because they’re paragons of pure love? Whatever the reason, Leonard and his companions are laying siege to the two dads’ consciences, and they’re not equally fortified.
Here, in the last paragraph of the review, you might expect to find some hint about the twist, or the lack of one. But what fun would that be? Shyamalan craftily embeds external information into the restricted setting of the cabin via emergency bulletins on the living room television. Such snippets of validation take the place of the horror trope of a leather-bound volume of witchcraft where the protagonist discovers etchings of the demon that’s haunting them. In Shyamalan’s world, these portents of doom unfold in stagey news clips, allowing for glimpses of large-scale horror out in the world while keeping the focus squarely on the little family and their captors in the cabin. Some of the characters die horribly, but not all of them. There’s a lovely moment that resolves without dialogue, expressed instead through an old disco tune. Whether or not you’re surprised by any of it isn’t the point. It’s more about how much you believe in the evidence of your eyes and ears, and what it would take to let doubt trickle in. The twist was inside you all along.
Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
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