Last night I finally saw M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock At The Cabin. It’s more of a mystifying situational conceit than what most of us would call a movie or even a campfire tale. It’s based on Paul Tremblay‘s “The Cabin At The End of The World,” which I haven’t read. But the screenplay, co-authored by Shyamalan, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, feels like a surreal dream (i.e., arresting impressions minus a compelling narrative) that was never developed into the kind of thing that most films need — i.e., a story that coheres.
Is it okay to defy conventional storytelling logic in order to create a conceptual horror film version of a Luis Bunuel film (i.e., a kind of Exterminating Angel set in a woodsy cabin)? Yeah, you can do that, sure. But guys like me don’t have to like it, much less recommend it to their readers.
There’s a fanciful notion here — i.e., a couple of guys being asked to sacrifice one of their lives in order to stop a worldwide apocalypse — and I’m telling you it doesn’t pay off or hang together. Not even a little bit. I realize I’m obliged to at least consider it as Bunuel-influenced but my gut still wants to call it precious bullshit.
And how, by the way, does a gay couple’s experience with homophobia from all sides….how does this connect with a global apocalypse or, for that matter, an invading foursome (Tankbod Ripplehead, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn, Rupert Grint) who are described near the end as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?
Which reminds me: Has anyone even thought of, much less seen, Vincent Minnelli‘s The Four Horsemen of the Aoocalypse (’62)? A MGM release that ran 153 nminutes, it costarred Glenn Ford, Ingrid Thulin (they exchanged fluids off-screen), Charles Boyer, Lee J. Cobb, Paul Lukas and Yvette Mimieux. I’ve never seen it, but I presume it was problematic
Boiled down, Knock At The Cabin is just a single-location “who dies and who lives?” thing, fortified or ornamented with a series of spooky end-of-the-world panoramas.
The best performance by far comes from Kristen Cui, who plays the adopted daughter of Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge‘s married couple.
Speaking as a serious fan of Groff (especially his starring performance in Mindhunter, which is only five or six years old), I was horrified to notice that he’s losing that young-guy physique and is becoming a bit stocky…no! What’s next — he grows a beard, puts on another 10 or 15 pounds and becomes a bear?
After Cabin ended I bolted upright, walked out to the lobby and immediately read the Wikipedia synopsis to see if I’d missed anything. I hadn’t. There’s a term for a movie like this — burn.
Why is it called Knock At The Cabin? Why isn’t it called A Knock At A Cabin? Why isn’t it called Tankbod Has An Axe?
