Dave Bautista delivers a standout performance in Knock at the Cabin and elevates M. Night Shyamalan’s apocalyptic thriller.
Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan’s career has been a roller coaster of sorts. A string of early, successful thrillers fueled his ascent to the realm of Hollywood’s hottest directors, only to have a few high-profile, big-budget flops bring his cachet crashing back down to earth. In recent years, a series of smaller, critically praised projects has put him back on a more gradual climb, and his latest film, Knock at the Cabin, is poised to bolster that momentum.
Although it doesn’t quite meet the high bar set by his best work, the powerfully tense Knock at the Cabin is lifted by strong performances by its cast — particularly Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 actor Dave Bautista — that sell its fantastic premise and keep you guessing as the brutal saga plays out.
Written and directed by Shyamalan and adapted from Paul G. Tremblay’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World, Knock at the Cabin doesn’t waste any time building up tension. The film opens with a young girl, Wen (Kristen Cui), catching grasshoppers in a secluded forest. Her efforts are interrupted by the arrival of a massive, but soft-spoken stranger, Leonard (Bautista), who walks out of the woods and makes friendly conversation with her before indicating that his heart is broken by the task set before him.
Things move quickly from that point, as Leonard is joined by three more strangers, each of them wielding savage weapons cobbled together with tools and garden implements. They descend upon the cabin where Wen is staying with her parents — Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew and force their way in, eventually explaining to the trio that they must make a terrible decision: either sacrifice one member of their family or all of humanity will perish in an escalating series of apocalyptic events.
The story puts Leonard’s group and Wen’s family on opposite sides of a seemingly impossible dilemma, as no amount of rational explanation by the former will convince the latter to do the unthinkable, even as one catastrophe after another ravages the world outside the cabin.
