The M. Night Shyamalan brand has always been a little wobbly — a typical MNS movie launches out of the gate with an expertly torqued genre set-up, pit stops for pulpy texture and earnest performances, and then goes off-road toward ridiculous and grandiose twist endings that manage to satisfy exactly no one. Once you apply smelling salts to the deathless swooning over The Sixth Sense (1999), the man’s name-above-the-title rep seems built on little more than mysteriously inflated expectations. If you’ve made it through Signs (2002), Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Visit (2015), and Old (2021), you may’ve worked up a fight-or-flight response to the man’s name. All the same, his profile seems to be on the ebb by now, which may be the best-case scenario for his new film, Knock at the Cabin, a tiny B-movie white-knuckler that deserves an unprejudiced day in court.
It should be remembered how eagle-eyed Shyamalan can be about tension and dread, and that, as a writer, he’s more convincing with the micro than the macro. Here, he has the advantage of adapting Paul Tremblay’s insidiously crafty novel The Cabin at the End of the World (a much tangier title), which is plotted like an eschatological extrapolation of the famous “trolley problem” thought experiment, where you’re responsible for the calculus of deciding which track you let a runaway trolley careen down, so it will either kill five people or only one. The movie’s set-up is everything, and you get it from the trailer: gay couple Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff) and their adopted Chinese 7-year-old daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) are home-invaded in their secluded cabin by four strangers, each carrying a large handmade bladed weapon. The spokesman is Leonard (Dave Bautista), a gentle giant in tattoos and eyeglasses, who lays out the situation in a rueful mutter: Thanks to visions of the apocalypse afflicting these perfectly ordinary people, the interlopers have…
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