Note: The review contains fundamental spoilers.
The films of M. Night Shyamalan can be divided into message movies and character movies. the message movies are the less successful. They include teachings on anti-psychiatry (“Split”), profiteering genetics (“Old”), and tribalism (“After Earth”). The exclamation marks in it are applied so thickly that character development is neglected.
the character movies again are excellent. They deal with overcoming physical illnesses (“Unbreakable”, “Glass”), coping with grief (“The Lady in the Water”) or working on dysfunctional family relationships (“The Sixth Sense”). A work like the badly underestimated “The Happening” is right in between message and character: Nature takes revenge on humans, but it is the mutual love of two people (and the deconcentration of civilizations, deindustrialization) that Mother Nature soothes again.
Shyamalan really shines in his new film Knock at the Cabin message. So much up messagethat you don’t even know anymore how to do it message should escape – one messagethat you don’t understand at all. On Twitter, Reddit or the “Explained” threads of fan sites, there will certainly be heated discussions about what social fantasy or dystopia the director wants to convey with this mess.
Example “Triage”: Let’s be honest, before Corona nobody used this word, apart from professionals in emergency medicine. In “Knock at the Cabin” it is verbalized as leverage. And immediately you think of Corona – you probably should too. A family (two gay fathers, one adopted daughter) is faced with a decision: one of the three must die of his own free will, or the world will end, with seven billion dead, not counting the family of three who will live to the end of a would have to walk earth that has been pushed back to the Stone Age. What is Shyamalan trying to tell us with triage – that we must make voluntary sacrifices so that others can survive? Apart from the fact that the term “triage” is also used incorrectly. In a triage, the decision about life and death is not made by the person concerned, that’s what makes it so bad.
The ominous message of a necessary execution or suicide is delivered by four people who break into the cabin of Eric (Jonathan Groff), Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and little Wen (Kristen Cui). Of course, the family thinks the invaders around Leonard (Dave Bautista) are lunatics, followers of conspiracy stories who have found each other in an online forum. Eric yells at her, “You met on AN ONLINE FORUM?!” As if that explains any weird message.
The point is that Shyamalan’s film grants absolution to these scumbags who, with their visions of biblical plagues, carry out supposedly imposed violence. When the prisoners understandably react with rejection of the (suicidal) murder plans, the first apocalyptic disasters set in – in a kind of countdown of terror. The climate is taking revenge on people, with tsunamis (current topic). Escalation level two: deadly viruses, especially deadly for children (current topic). And finally: planes fall from the sky (two current topics – terrorists and the failure of automated transport technology). After all, the planes falling from the sky look scary. They are not seen diving and their engines are not screeching. The airliners fall silently, vertically, like unconscious people. Cameraman Jarin Blaschke manages to take impressive pictures here, although Shyamalan probably hired him because of his claustrophobic shots in Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse”; alone, the hut shots in the “Cabin” seem strangely spacious, distant.
Among the armed missionaries who break into the hut and take their hostages to prayer is Redmond (Rupert Grint, who, like in Shyamalan’s TV series “Servant”, again provides a sad indication through his overly choleric demeanor that he will probably work forever on Ron Weasley) a homophobic redneck who the tied up Eric recognizes – he once attacked him in a bar. That’s why Eric senses a set-up in the quartet of invaders, he suspects their motive is hatred of people instead of fantasies of saving the world – and Shyamalan insinuates for a not unimportant moment that paranoia determines the life of gay men. The fact that the director plays with these insecurities is a rather insensitive trait.
Especially since Shyamalan’s own comparisons of “Knock at the Cabin” to his 2002 film “Signs” don’t really fit. Both emphasize the importance of solving seemingly insurmountable problems by holding on to faith. But neither Andrew nor Eric nor Wen are believers. Andrew recognizes the “horsemen of the apocalypse” in the four burglars, but unlike Pastor Graham in “Signs”, he is not a self-confessed Christian. His sacrifice for humanity hinges on a sudden, unsustainable belief, born of the perception of a divine apparition outside of our visual frame (or we viewers will have to search Google Images or, once the flick is available to stream, hit the pause button, maybe find we then what). The background of the three family members – the rejection of the gay partnership by parents-in-law described in flashbacks, the adoption of a baby apparently made possible with tricks, the girl’s lip scar – have no connection whatsoever with the dynamics of the story. And as soon as there is a lack of biographical depth, later, courageous decisions by the protagonists are incomprehensible. Missing here is the heroic journey that turns Andrew into the Jesus-like savior who dies for our sins. The way from A to B is missing. The opening credits are also ill-conceived with their presentation of confused handwritten notes and calculations that none of the intruders could have made. Conspiracy tellers these days don’t pick up pens anymore, they belch over keyboards as loudly as they can into the web.
Shyamalan wants to share something about the “state of the world”: the need for source checking (the TV schedule shows only serious apocalypse channels, BBC, CNN) and the important trust in one’s judgment in a society of opinion -overloads. However, if in the end you don’t follow evidence but only your feelings, like Andrew, the act of persuasion makes no sense. Once again, Shyamalan has stuffed one of his screenplays (based on a script by Paul G. Tremblay) with too many conflicting ideas. The third act isn’t quite as miserable as the “Love Island”-like ending of “Old”, but the sentimentality of the 53-year-old, a former master of horror, which can no longer be overlooked and compulsively obliges to a positive film ending, is a role model for Ari Aster and Robert Eggers is questionable.
“Knock at the Cabin” is so confused that luckily the story doesn’t include a Shyamalan twist that would have added to the confusion. On the other hand, Shyamalan has delivered his second bad film in a row after “Old”, which is all the more regrettable because in the noughties and tens he only made bad films when he had a high budget (“Avatar – the last Airbender”) or Star Power (Will Smith, “After Earth”) had available. Knock at the Cabin is a narrower film. But Shyamalan does not control him.
Is it getting tight for him? In the last ten years he brought only one good work to the cinema with “Glass”; This is offset by a decent (“The Visit”) and three failures (“After Earth”, “Old” and now “Knock at the Cabin”), but also a solid final girl thriller that made a lot of money: ” split”. Shyamalan is a comeback man, he’s proven that before. When “Cabin” has been processed, he may have to make his second comeback.
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