Written by: Ryan Dailey
Had the audience sitting in the theaters in 1999 watching The Sixth Sense been told what kind of anti-climatic yawn-fests would come out of then flavor of the week, M. Night Shyamalan, would dole out at the start of the new millennium and beyond, they would have shook their heads in disbelief and gone back to drinking their Snapple and eating their 3D Doritos.
Smash cut twenty- four years and a string of universally panned films later, M. Night Shyamalan is back in theaters with Knock at the Cabin.
Loosely based on a 2018 novel by Paul Tremblay, and follows a family staying in a remote cabin when they are suddenly taken hostage by a group of people claiming to be there to stop the apocalypse.
While seven year-old Wen (Kristen Cui) is vacationing with her parents, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) she is approached by a mountain of a man wearing glasses. The man, Leonard, (Dave Bautista) and Wen hit off quickly, chasing grasshoppers in the yard and all seems well until the moment three more people emerge brandishing weapons. At this point is where the group breaks into the home to lay out their plans to stall the apocalypse.
The rest of the film’s run-time is essentially another version of The Happening using set pieces from Signs.
The remainder of the film is the group saying that the only way to stop the catastrophic events happening in the outside world is to have the family make a sacrifice, to which the family refuses. The family pleads and tries to convince the home invaders that the goings on in the world are just a string of coincidences, the group insists they are signs of the coming end times, the family says that it is not, lather, rinse and repeat. The Shyamalan twist in this one is that he tries to make you believe there is a twist, but instead offers an anticlimactic ending to an, at best,mediocre movie.
The only saving grace is Dave Bautista’s acting. The beast of a man plays timid in a way that gives the character a subtle layer that would not be there otherwise.
M. Night Shyamalan delivers, once again, a mediocre entry into the horror nation. From a technical standpoint, the man is adequate. He understands composition and shot set ups, but when it comes to writing, his recent works Split into shards of broken, barely palatable Glass.
Knock at the Cabin will make the audience wish that they would have used their Sixth Sense and went to see Infinity Pool instead.
Knock at the Cabin is playing in theaters now.