Image © Universal Pictures
Knock at the Cabin
Knock at the Cabin
M. Night Shyamalan adapted Knock at the Cabin from Paul G. Tremblay’s 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World, and like good horror fiction it magnifies actual anxieties. It’s the story of true believers with a horrifying shared vision of an impending apocalypse. They are convinced that only they can stop it—with the help of a family they hold hostage.
Knock at the Cabin begins in the woods with eight-year-old Wen (Kristin Cui) looking a grasshopper in the eye. Gently she snatches the creature and places it in a jar, assuring the bug that she means no harm. Alerted by the crunch of boots on the trail, she looks up at a stranger, a gentle giant called Leonard (Dave Bautista). Soon enough he’s joined by the other three pedestrians of the apocalypse, bearing homemade medieval looking weapons. Too late do Wen’s fathers, Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff), heed her warnings about the strange crew about to descend on their summer home.
Several levels of interpretation for the screenplay are possible including metaphors of class war, climate change and spirituality. Andrew and Eric are affluent urban professionals confronted by the hoi polloi: schoolteacher Leonard, healthcare worker Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), kitchen cook Adriane (Abby Quinn) and ex-con Redmond (Rupert Grint). The foursome met on message boards, discovering that they share the same disturbing visions of imminent global disaster—along with some specific directives from the force behind the vision. There is no doubt that Leonard, Sabrina and Adriane are genuine in their belief. However, Redmond might have an ulterior motive. Was he the homophobe who attacked Andrew several years earlier and did time as a result?
Their spokesman, Leonard, is sincerely regretful for what he has to say. He explains to Andrew and Eric that they were told in their vision that the apocalypse can be averted if the chosen family, their family, sacrifices one of its members—one life in exchange for the survival of humanity. Leonard realizes it’s a lot to ask, but after all, one for seven billion?
And as they turn to the TV news, the disasters come as predicted: first earthquakes triggering tsunamis that sweep across the Pacific Northwest, then a spike in the latest deadly virus, but stranger still are the hundreds of airplanes that fall from the sky all across the world. The clock is ticking toward everlasting midnight, according to the family’s captors, unless they agree to make the sacrifice.
Andrew is an angry rationalist, dismissing the newscasts their captors see as proving their prophesy as coincidence, nothing but madness run amok. But Eric hears them out and begins to wonder if “coincidence” is a word for dismissing the patterns most of us are unable or unwilling to see.
Shyamalan is a masterful cinematic craftsman. Suspense builds—Will Andrew undo the knots that tie him to his chair and go for his handgun? Are strange things really happening in the world outside the cabin?—and wraps it in less than two hours, complete with short flashbacks establishing Ed and Andrew’s relationship and their adoption of Wen. The gore is kept off camera but the emotional closeups are intense. The four captors are given distinct personalities and a glimpse of their back stories, enough to make at least three of them sympathetic. Not a minute is wasted.
Hovering over Knock at the Cabin are questions of purpose in the universe. Do “our choices make our destiny,” as Adrianne says? Is humanity worthy of destruction for its sins against the world? Is there an absent god or an active evil demigod? Maybe a conspiracy capturing the imagination of people seeking to believe in something bigger than themselves? What’s it all about?
