M. Night Shyamalan’s latest twist? Making bad movies

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

With films like The Sixth Sense and The Village, M. Night Shyamalan is a modern day thriller legend. That talent makes his latest flop – “Knock at the Cabin” – all the more disappointing.

At first the film seemed promising. It follows the story of a couple (Eric and Andrew) and their child (Wen) staying in an idyllic cabin in the woods when four strangers (Leonard, Sabrina, Adrian and Redmond) knock on their door. The strangers present her with an impossible choice: the family must voluntarily sacrifice one of its members or the world will end. The film is essentially an adaptation of the trolley problem in psychology and ethics.

The cast gave hope. Jonathan Groff, who I’ve loved since my anxious Spring Awakening days, plays Eric. Dave Bautista, whom you may know from Guardians of the Galaxy but really shines in My Spy, plays Leonard. Perhaps the real tragedy of “Knock at the Cabin” is that it held so much promise and yet was a desolate disappointment.

Imagine that feeling you get on a roller coaster: your stomach clenches as you come to the top, ready for the fall. “Knock at the Cabin” was like that, but the drop never came. I sat and waited for the twist to come, but was instead left with an unsatisfactory and seemingly unfinished film.

The film successfully builds concern for at least the first half. For example, when the four visitors pressure the family to choose their victim, Andrew finds he recognizes Redmond. Years ago, Redmond had beaten up Andrew for being gay. After Andrew has this realization, the apocalypse group reveals that Redmond was the one who brought them all together through a chat room.

With this new information, we want to assume that the visitors are delusional. So the news raises doubts: maybe the apocalypse won’t happen? On the other hand, with planes falling from the sky like dead birds, the group’s apocalypse theory doesn’t seem so ridiculous after all. For a while at least, we’re left in Shyamalan’s signature pit of uneasiness, not knowing who to trust.

However, he throws away all that hard work at the end of the film. Rather than knocking the rug out from under us, the film goes exactly where you’d expect it to: the apocalypse is real and Eric decides to sacrifice himself. This anticlimactic ending made the rest of the film feel like a huge waste of time and made me question the film’s claim to fit into the “mystery” genre. That’s all the more disappointing when we learn that the film’s source material, a book called The Cabin at the End of the World, has a much more exciting ending.

Without a puzzle, Knock at the Cabin just seems boring. A simple trolley issue isn’t original enough to stand on its own, and the layering of social commentary feels half-baked and out of place. Throughout the film we see flashbacks to Eric and Andrew’s relationship, showing both their love and moments when they faced homophobia, e.g. B. when Andrew’s parents refused to accept their relationship or when they lie about being brothers in order to adopt their daughter.

The film uses this hatred to enrage Andrew even more: since everyone has been terrible to him, he has no problem watching the world burn. This seemed like a huge barrage of stereotypes and generalizations that somehow demonize someone who has faced discrimination for a lifetime.

The film’s oddly theological tone kept me wondering what Shyamalan was trying to say. Eric is vaguely religious, which tended to make him believe that the apocalypse was coming, but that inclination seems to come out of nowhere. Eric is portrayed as a spiritual martyr while Andrew is vilified for his anger at homophobia. The binary is offensive and simplistic. He adds to the film’s theological confusion by having Eric say things about religion that frankly don’t make sense.

For example, Eric says at one point that the four invaders represent the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the core qualities of human nature: “wickedness, caring, healing, and leadership.” In the Bible the four horsemen of the apocalypse are plague, death, war and famine and it seems odd that a guy this religious doesn’t know that. More importantly, who would reduce the qualities of human nature to this arbitrary list of four? These and other scenes seemed like a forced and confusing reckoning with religion.

The film clearly suffered from direction, but some of the acting was decent. Groff gave a convincingly torn character, and Bautista similarly impressed by playing a sinister gentle giant. The rest of the acting ranged from passable to poor, with Redmond (Rupert Grint) and Adrian (Abby Quinn) giving particularly poor melodramatic performances.

“Knock at the Cabin” was an all round disappointment full of empty binaries and brute simplification. The worst part was that it was a thriller with no thrills. Hopefully Shyamalan improves from here, but after his painfully obvious turn in “Old,” I’m not sure he’s moving in the right direction.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and contains subjective thoughts, opinions, and criticisms.