DAN WEBSTER:
Some movies can be identified by a single line of dialogue. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” is pure Jaws. “There’s no place like home” can’t be anything other than The Wizard of Oz. And only the very young, the very old or the very uninterested could fail to recognize “may the Force be with you” as a signature line from Star Wars.
Here’s another one: “I see dead people.” That line, of course, was delivered by the 11-year-old Haley Joel Osment in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 thriller The Sixth Sense. Not only did the film make Osment something of a star (the luster of which, as with most child actors, dimmed as he matured), it established Shyamalan as a filmmaker with promise.
Similar to Osment’s career, Shyamalan’s promise gradually waned over the next two decades. Yes, such films as 2000’s Unbreakable, 2004’s The Village and 2016’s Split include memorable moments, mainly because Shyamalan makes films that, for the most part, boast impeccable visuals.
But little he has done since The Sixth Sense has matched that film’s overall quality, in both tone and in Shyamalan’s ability to blend his personal directorial style with a satisfying narrative. And that latter trend toward mediocrity continues with his latest release, Knock at the Cabin.
Based on the 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay, and starring the likes of Dave Bautista, Jonathan Goff and former Harry Potter star Rupert Grint, Knock at the Cabin boasts Shyamalan’s trademark mix of psychology and horror.
Goff and Ben Aldridge play Eric and Andrew, a couple who head for a weekend stay at a remote Pennsylvania forest cabin with their 8-year-old adopted daughter Wen (played by Kristen Cui). It is Wen who, while capturing grasshoppers, first encounters Leonard (played by Bautista)—as he appears suddenly from out of the forest.
Bautista makes a foreboding figure, what with his hulking former pro-wrestler physique and tattooed arms, even if Leonard’s attitude is mournfully gentle. It’s only when three other people, each carrying fierce-looking tools, show up that the now-frightened Wen scrambles into the cabin to warn her two dads.
Pretty soon, the scary quartet is outside the front door, with Leonard—his voice still gentle, even beseeching, yet insistent—demanding entrance. Which is when Shyamalan, virtually putting us the audience in Eric and Andrew’s position, poses the question: what would we do in such a circumstance?
He then proceeds to show us the efforts that Eric, Andrew and Wen put up to resist, which are in vain, before getting to the essential plot point: standing over the two dads, now tied to chairs, Leonard explains that visions he and the others share have led them to this cabin. Moreover, he says, Eric, Andrew or Wen must make an important decision: one of them, he proclaims, must willingly die—or the world itself will end.
Okay, that sounds crazy, right?, the product of minds that have been twisted by some sort of shared psychotic breakdown. And that’s how Eric and Andrew respond… even after planes start falling from the sky.
This isn’t the first time that Shyamalan has taken on apocalyptic themes. His 2008 film The Happening builds its plot around nature threatening humanity. But it’s one thing to pose a strange occurrence, such as nature rebelling. That scenario virtually screams environmental concerns.
It’s quite another, though, to present a theme that smacks of religious fervor with no explanation as to why the visions, why the strange tools, why this particular cabin, why these four servants of fate, not to mention—most of all—why target this blended family of two dads and an Asian child?
Shyamalan built his reputation on a conceit: suspenseful plotlines with a climactic twist. It worked well in The Sixth Sense. As did Osment’s classic line about seeing dead people. It doesn’t work here, though, where perhaps the most memorable line is sung by KC and the Sunshine Band. But their refrain of “I want to put on my my my my my Boogie shoes” is just as confounding as everything else.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster writes about movies and more for Spokane7.com.
