Knock at the Cabin Review: An Apocalypse Drama That Earns Its Faith in Humanity

Though it’s an adaptation of a novel by Paul Tremblay, Knock at the Cabin feels as if might have sprung from M. Night Shyamalan’s own imagination. The film concerns a family of three—partners Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and their young daughter, Wen (Kristen Cui)—whose idyll at their cabin in the woods is interrupted when they’re taken hostage by four strangers. These intruders—Leonard (Dave Bautista), Redmon (Rupert Grint), Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and Adriane (Abby Quinn)—claim not to know each other, but they share a common purpose: Each recently suffered terrible visions of a coming apocalypse that can only be averted if the family sacrifices one of their own.

The premise cannot help but sound like a more grounded version of Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods. But where that film operated as an ironic deconstruction of genre tropes, Knock at the Cabin commits fully to the immediately emotional responses of both a family trapped in a horrific situation and the home invaders whose belief that the only way to save humanity is through sacrifice visibly wars with their sense of right and wrong. Particularly effective on this front is Bautista, whose intimidating size is ultimately less menacing than the eerie calm and rationality with which Leonard speaks of the Blakean visions of doom that plague his mind.

Shyamalan’s economical, patient direction calls additional attention to the characters’ internal struggles, monitoring each of their subtle changes in expression in order to capture the way, for instance, the hostages silently try to game out an escape or how their captors grow ever more desperate in their pleas for the family to make a sacrifice. During a number of Knock at the Cabin’s present-day scenes, rack focus is used to shift between points of view, often narrowing the depth of field to suggest the walls closing in around the characters.

When Eric is concussed in an early scuffle, shots from his perspective open the aperture of the camera to let in too much light as both a literal reflection of his heightened photosensitivity and a more abstract indication that he’s starting to believe the intruders. Andrew, meanwhile, refuses to entertain any of this, even when news broadcasts indicate that there may be some truth to the prophecies, and flashbacks to a hate crime from his past hint that he regards the home invasion as just one more case of bigots threatening him and his loved ones.

Knock at the Cabin takes its time delving into these responses, to the point that this becomes less of a thriller than an unorthodox character study, especially as the film’s expertly deployed use of flashback slowly forms the emotional core of the story. Despite Shyamalan’s recurring depictions of invasive surveillance by malevolent forces, his characters never come across as mere spectacles for the pleasure of villains or, metatextually, the filmmaker himself.

Shyamalan’s cornball earnestness, often singled out by critics as his biggest flaw, is also what keeps his films from settling into dispassionate stylistic exercises. They never lose sight of the fact that their characters are human beings, and even Knock at the Cabin’s weighing of individual right to life against global survival isn’t an easy exchange.

For someone who’s infamous for his plot twists, Shyamalan ultimately structures his stories to foreground the way that extreme threats to order induce reflection and a change in attitude. There are no narrative rug pulls in Knock at the Cabin, nor any lingering visceral interest in the violence that gradually escalates throughout. Instead, the film movingly remains focused on what sacrifice demands of people, and the empathy it displays toward all of its characters marks it as one of the few apocalyptic dramas to earn its enduring faith in humanity.