Monthly Archives: August 2023

‘Knock at The Cabin’: Get A Doorbell


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.

Really, He’s Less A Devil’s Advocate Than Satan’s Cabana Boy

Devil’s advocate was once an official position in the Catholic Church.

The term “devil’s advocate” is a familiar label for someone who argues a position they don’t agree with just to make a point, but its origins are more literal than you might expect. In 1587, Pope Sixtus V established the position of advocatus diaboli, or “devil’s advocate,” as part of the process of beatification or canonization — aka becoming a saint. The devil’s advocate was the church’s skeptic, picking apart stories of reported “miracles” and more to argue against someone’s sainthood. The advocate had to be present for any part of the sainthood process to be considered valid. However, the title was primarily a popular moniker — the position’s official designation was the “promoter of the faith,” or promotor fidei.

For hundreds of years, sainthood was relatively rare, but Pope John Paul II (head of the Catholic Church from 1978 to 2005) believed the church needed more examples of sanctity, so he effectively abolished the position of devil’s advocate in 1983 as part of a revision of the canonization procedures. He also shortened the posthumous waiting period for saints from 50 years after death to just five years. These and other changes ushered in an unprecedented number of new saints. In the 600 years before John Paul II, around 300 people were declared saints. In the less than three decades of his papacy, John Paul II oversaw the canonization of 482 saints. The current pope, Pope Francis, has continued this new tradition by canonizing nearly 900 people (including Mother Teresa, Anglican convert Cardinal John Henry Newman, and Swiss seamstress Marguerite Bays) — whether the devil likes it or not.