M. Night Shyamalan is impossible to read, sometimes literally.
The writer/director/producer can burst from the cinematic gate with a film like The Sixth Sense, then drown in The Lady in The Water. He’ll post Signs, then fold in The Last Airbender. Split will shatter in Glass. The guy is as mercurial as quicksilver.
Alas, the thermostat is turned way down in Knock at The Cabin, a tepid suspense film that aims to bring the world to the edge of extinction, but instead brings the viewer to the brink of slumber.
Starring the behemoth (and talented) actor Dave Bautista, Cabin imagines a world facing mysterious and unexplained End Times, much like the turgid The Happening, which posited humankind’s demise by a gentle breeze (?).
Here, the threatening closing curtain comes from God Almighty, a stark and unfortunate break from Shyamalan’s previous works. He’s always been fascinated by the supernatural, but rarely do we see him quoting Scripture.
He doesn’t exactly do it here, but his four menacing home invaders do. They even wear the colors of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse. But they don’t bring Conquest, War, Famine and Death. They bring an ultimatum to a vacationing family of three: Kill a loved loved one, or the world will exist in a “permanent midnight.” To prove their point, they inflict some savagery on each other.
Of course, in the Bible, even God said “psyche!” before Abraham was ordered to murder his son Isaac. Either Shyamalan didn’t read that far — or realized that wouldn’t make much of an impression in Hollywood, which is agnostic at best.
Cabin doesn’t make much of an impression, either, even when it’s streaming on Amazon.
Eric (Jonathan Voss) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) bring their adopted daughter Wen (newcomer Kristin Cui) to a remote Pennsylvania cabin for a getaway vacation. But it takes about five minutes for the excursion to turn menacing when Leonard (Bautista) and his unmerry band show up to tell them the bad news.
Though based on a popular book by Paul Tremblay, the movie’s 100-minute runtime wedges the story into an impossible corner of brief monologues to substitute for viable character fleshing (save for Bautista, who is terrific). The rest simply look scary or scared.
Religious rapture comes from sinful living. Cabin’s rapture comes from sinful screenwriting; We get no explanation for humanity’s eviction letter besides, you know, times are cuckoo. It’s not enough, and thus neither is our interest. The film doesn’t telegraph its ending: It broadcasts it in 4K.
There are a few glimmers. Bautista is mesmerizing in everything he does, and Cui holds more than her own. Shyamalan is great at casting kids, from Haley Joel Osment in Sense to Abigail Breslin in Signs.
But they are glimmers, not gold. Shyamalan is best when he’s exploring demons within, and too many run crisscross unleashed here. Even on a streamer, viewers are due at least a partial refund for this stay.
