Film Review: KNOCK AT THE CABIN (2023): M. Night Shyamalan’s Latest Thriller Misses the Mark with its Uninspired Characters

Knock at the Cabin Review

Knock at the Cabin (2023) Film Review, a movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan, written by Steve Desmond, Michael Sherman and M. Night Shyamalan and starring Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rupert Grint, Abby Quinn, Kristen Cui, McKenna Kerrigan, Ian Merrill Peakes, Denise Nakano, Satomi Hofmann, Kevin Leung, Lee Avant, Kat Murphy and Kittson O’Neill.

Every film that M. Night Shyamalan directs isn’t going to have a twist ending. Audiences loved the filmmaker’s surprise ending to The Sixth Sense and, more recently, some people enjoyed the genuinely unexpected ending to Old. The twist to Shyamalan’s latest, Knock at the Cabin, is that the story is as simple on the surface as it appears making the expectation for Shyamalan to bring something extra to the table unmet. That’s partly OK, though because Shyamalan has made an interesting film. It’s just not a very good one.

What isn’t OK, however, is the laughable scenes towards the end of his new movie. Why are they laughable? Well, for one, in the middle of a supposed apocalypse, the characters end up at a diner with people eating and working there. It’s inane. Shouldn’t these people be holding on for their dear lives and praying to a higher power? No, they’re eating and working at a diner. I may understand the eating part. Can’t quite grasp that someone would go to work at a diner during an apocalypse. Sorry.

Let’s take it back a notch. Dave Bautista stars in the picture. He plays Leonard, a man who shows up at a cabin in the middle of nowhere and tells a young little girl named Wen (Kristen Cui) that he needs to speak to her parents about a serious matter. Wen’s parents are Eric (a solid Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (a decent Ben Aldridge). They’re they’re not too happy that Leonard has arrived with three cohorts–Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Redmond (Rupert Grint) and Ardiane (Abby Quinn) who sport weapons and claim the apocalypse is upon them and that either Eric, Andrew or Wen has to die in order to prevent other people across the world from dying untimely deaths. These strange people led by Leonard want to stop the end of the world from happening so it takes a little less than an hour and a half before anything that happens in the film has any logic embroiled into it. Then, we get to the diner where somebody’s there working. Ugh. I give up.

M. Night Shayamalan likes to appear in his pictures and he has a cameo here as a home shopping network representative who comes on to the television in the film. Shyamalan is doing something that Alfred Hitchcock used to do and it’s cute but totally unnecessary here. Whereas in films like The Village or Old, his presence has a deeper meaning, this time out, it’s just a cameo for no other reason than for the director to appear in his own movie.

There are moments in Knock at the Cabin that grab you such as those in which Eric and Andrew try to protect their daughter from the harm that threatens her when Leonard and co. appear. This movie has a ridiculous plot, though. As it develops, Eric and Andrew may just want to give these people the benefit of the doubt. Instead, the movie lingers on until things spiral out of control in the plot big time. I’m not saying one of the characters should just die so easily without putting up a fight, but, instead, the movie becomes a series of people getting knocked off one at a time in gratuitous ways. There are a lot of unclear elements in the story line (why this family, in particular?) but it is what it is. An apocalypse is coming unless M. Night Shyamalan can pull another one of those twist endings for which he is so well known. SPOILER ALERT: He doesn’t nor does he even try much.

Bautista is fine in his role here. He plays the part as he should have and manages to keep the audience questioning how he knows all the information he does and just how true it all is. The supporting cast isn’t bad. Rupert Grint comes off as a little bit menacing, Abby Quinn’s character is appropriately eccentric and Nikki Amuka-Bird tries to keep her character’s integrity intact in her role in the picture. But, something’s missing.

It’s not likable characters that are missing. We like Eric, Andrew and Wen enough. There just could have been some more logical answers in terms of the characters’ choices in the movie that would make the action that ensues as it does more plausible. It’s an interesting story, to be certain. It’s just not convincing the way it plays out in the picture.

M. Night Shyamalan is a good filmmaker, sometimes a great one. Something attracted him to this story and it reminds me a bit of his total disaster of a film, The Happening. Both films are hugely ambitious but take downward spirals in their endings due partly to the poor decision making of their central characters.

Knock at the Cabin is not a total disappointment but it certainly boggles the mind how the film got made this way. There was a lot of potential that was squandered for a story line that should have been much more rewarding to its audience and a bit more believable too. Yes, even apocalyptic stories could benefit greatly from logical approaches to the material.

Rating: 5.5/10

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