Knock at the Cabin
M. Night Shyamalan makes The Trolley Problem your problem in this disappointing drama
Ben Aldridge, Kristen Cui, Jonathan Groff, and Dave Bautista ponder the end of the world in M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin.
Husbands Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) just want a quiet vacation with their daughter Wen (Kristen Cui, in her feature debut). They rent a remote cabin in the woods of Pennsylvania and settle in for a weekend of swimming, dancing, and bonding.
Unfortunately for them, four strangers emerge from the wood nearby, brandishing weapons and politely asking if they can talk. Like the world’s scariest Jehovah’s Witnesses, the group knocks on the cabin door, saying the world will end if Eric and Andrew don’t open up.
When the couple refuses, the four strangers break in. They are Redmond (Rupert Grint), Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane (Abby Quinn), and Leonard (Dave Bautista). They tie up Eric and Andrew but promise not to hurt them. They say that Eric and Andrew’s family are chosen and that they must volunteer to sacrifice one member of the family to prevent the apocalypse. If they won’t choose, one of their captors will be sacrificed and a plague will be released on humanity.
Andrew is convinced this is all a mass delusion, but Eric isn’t so sure. When planes begin falling from the sky and tsunamis roar toward the coast, the couple must decide if they believe in the apocalypse and the power of sacrifice.
What would you choose?
Based on the award-winning novel The Cabin at the End of the World, Knock at the Cabin is a movie that starts well, but ends flat on its face. It’s almost as if by choosing to continue watching the movie, you’re unleashing plagues onto the film, making it worse as each second ticks by. And just a note for kids with a book report due or wastrel book club members — Director M. Night Shyamalan changes a great deal of the book’s plot, so don’t watch this thinking you’ve got yourself a summary and talking points. The film boils down to Shyamalan thinking he’s got the solution to The Trolley Problem.
The Trolley Problem has been debated for decades. The philosophical ethics dilemma is as follows: If you saw a trolley speeding toward a group of 10 people, would you choose to divert it, knowing it would strike and kill one person, or allow it to plow into the crowd? What if the one person the trolley killed was your child/mother/spouse? Does your answer change? It’s an interesting question that asks you to debate your ethical standards.
Or it would be.
Director M. Night Shyamalan offers up Knock at the Cabin as a sort of Trolley Problem, but before you can really think about the implications of each choice, he goes ahead and solves it for you. This has long been the problem for the director, who seems to fear ambiguity in storytelling more than he fears ghosts or aliens. Shyamalan seems pathologically incapable of allowing the audience to discuss or debate his films. There’s one clear answer, and he’s going to hammer it into your skull until you submit.
That’s fine for movies like The Visit, where fleeing from creepy grandparents is the biggest problem faced by the protagonists. But in a movie that asks you whether or not you believe one family’s sacrifice can save the world, taking away the ability to debate flattens the story to an almost unbearable parable about the beauty of one’s duty. Sitting through this film felt like being tricked into watching a God Is Dead-type faith-based movie, with mildly better production values.
And that’s a shame because the actors are doing everything they can to bail out this sinking ship of a movie. Bautista in particular is both menacing and oddly sweet as the leader of the strangers, Leonard. A grade school teacher, Leonard knows how to speak to Wen so she won’t be afraid and is unfailingly polite, even when Eric and Andrew lob insults and accusations at him. He’s the perfect gentle giant, and he’d be endearing if he wasn’t asking the couple to choose a member of their little family to sacrifice.
Aldridge puts in some great work as the foil to Leonard’s undying faith. His Andrew is a fiercely cynical man, who clings to his family as the one good thing in a damaged world. He pokes holes in Leonard’s apocalypse claims and steadfastly refuses to be sucked into what he believes to be a mass delusion.
But the problem with Eric and Andrew as a couple is Shyamalan gives us so little to go on about their lives that why they’d be chosen and how remains a mystery. Shyamalan is so busy trying to construct this grandiose answer to the question he posed that he doesn’t bother to shade any of the characters. Eric and Andrew are just nice people. Wen is a lovely child. Andrew gets angry sometimes because a bigot attacked him in a bar. Eric is just a saint given little to do but look over his family beatifically whenever the camera pans his way.
The movie also can’t seem to keep itself from silly spectacle. The found footage of the tsunami hitting the shores is…odd. How the news was able to recover and source the footage from a cellphone that’s presumably still floating in the wave surge might be the biggest unanswered question in the film.
By failing to shade in his characters or allow any ambiguity in the problem they face, the movie squanders a solid beginning. If Shyamalan would learn to trust his audience, his flare for drama would be excellent. But instead, we’re left with a movie that offers a flat narrative, poor character development, and an ending that feels condescending.
Verdict: This movie had real potential, but this is definitely not a film to pay a premium to see at theaters.
Knock at the Cabin is rated R and available in theaters Feb. 3.
