Knock at the Cabin (2023).
The categorical strictures of genre filmmaking have always done a disservice to M. Night Shyamalan. The director’s films are built upwards from otherwise earthbound drama, with their supernatural, comic-book tropes, and general suspense working as auxiliary elements rather than storytelling engines. This “formula”—a term Shyamalan justly bristles at—yields consistently fascinating results, deriving emotional resolve from narrative dissonance. This can be seen in everything from Unbreakable (2000) to The Happening (2008), which eschew conventional climaxes for parting acknowledgements of their characters’ virtues and weaknesses: the former film culminates with Bruce Willis’s technically invincible, reluctant hero, David Dunne, encountering his one debility, water, and is forced to rely on those he was initially saving to then save him, before the villain can be truly apprehended. It’s far from a perfect victory; instead, it’s a sober acceptance of responsibility, with action, violence, superficial excitement all secondary.
The idea of victory, with its requisite sacrifices and pyrrhic achievements, electrifies Shyamalan’s newest film, a liberal adaptation of Paul G. Tremblay’s novel, The Cabin At the End of the World, transposed to Knock At the Cabin. The same-sex couple of Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff) are vacationing with their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) at a remote cabin in wooded Pennsylvania, when the threat of apocalypse is brought to bear upon their tight-knit unit. While amateur entomologist Wen collects grasshoppers in the tall grass, a burly figure appears in the shallow-focused landscape: it’s Leonard (a remarkable Dave Bautista), a soft-spoken emissary with three others in tow, all of whom have arrived to prevent the impending doomsday, as prophesied by the foursome’s shared visions. After forcing their way in with sinister homemade weapons when their polite request for entry is denied, Leonard and his compatriots, Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane (Abby Quinn), and Redmond (Rupert Grint), mount what plays like a hastily put-together pitch meeting for their beliefs, replete with palpable nervousness and intergroup tension. The flow of information on the end of the world, which can only be prevented by the family willfully sacrificing one of their own, is dictated by a second grade teacher, a line-cook, a nurse, and a homophobic meterman.
The Visit (2015).
As a locus of faith, secularism, violence, sacrifice, familial history, and everything in between, the cabin satisfies Shyamalan’s penchant for rendering physical parameters disorienting and threatening, without forgoing spatial continuity. Always keen to all forms of geography, Shyamalan has nevertheless stripped away extraneous settings from his more recent films, starting with 2015’s self-funded The Visit, hitting upon creativity in the found footage film that was once-thought extinct, flaunting both ambition and immediacy comparable to the original The Blair Witch Project (1999). In the film, two teenage siblings spend five days with their hitherto-estranged grandparents, who disapproved of their mother’s choice in marriage. A veritable menace festers as the grandparents explain away their respectively unnerving behaviors (short tempers, frequent vomiting, chasing the kids with a nigh-murderous fervor during hide-and-seek), before the children learn that this elderly man and woman are not their grandparents. Already questionable tenets of hominess are flipped on their heads, the single setting gradually devolving from an oasis of reunification to a hellish netherworld, where even a game of Yahtzee is a life-or-death ordeal.
Made with five million dollars borrowed with his own home as collateral, The Visit matched Shyamalan’s idiosyncrasies with a personal authority extended throughout the shoot, which proceeded with Unbreakable’s workaround sequel, the similarly self-funded Split (2017). The secret shoot of The Visit, as well as its amateur-videographer conceit, introduced a malleability in the editing process that Shyamalan took advantage of to produce the “arthouse” cut, the “straightforward comedy” cut, and, ultimately, the multifaceted, median version we’re so lucky to have. The success of The Visit, among other things, led the director to striking a formal agreement with Walt Disney Studios wherein he could reclaim Willis’s character, which opened up the avenue for a bleak, shockingly greyscale crossover of Unbreakable and Split, 2019’s Glass.
Shyamalan’s penchant for sinuous and non-categorizable arbiters of horror, which run the gamut from fakery (The Village) to the Earth itself (The Happening), was often wielded against him, and his predilection for emotional stakes supplanting an easily explained boogeyman was obviously not enough for more bloodthirsty audiences. For a director who always makes sure to catalog his characters’ messy, emotional responses to earth-shattering events, it makes sense that Shyamalan derives significant tension from shifting allegiances among characters, a motif once veiled now recently foregrounded and made explicit. Like its immediate predecessors, Old (2021) has embryonic significance within Shyamalan’s own life—it’s based off a French graphic novel, Sandcastle, by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, gifted to the director by his daughters—which undergird a singular shuffling and reshuffling of actors (among them: Amuka-Bird, Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Ken Leung, Thomasin McKenzie, Alex Wolff, Vicky Krieps) to account for the rapid-aging experiences fomented by the beach they’re inexplicably trapped on. More than a horror film, Old is a death-drive, absolutely despairing as various members of this group are peeled away and disposed of, each one stamped with an all too soon expiration date. Vicious, but not cruel, Shyamalan is unwaveringly attuned to the intricacies of each family unit, and thus, Old harkens back to the work of Tobe Hooper, specifically films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) or The Funhouse (1981), where empathetically chronicled downtime is essential to the otherwise visceral plot. The one constant variable throughout this whirling compendium of body horror is the escapism of play, sandcastles erected on the beach as children, and then again as premature adults.
Glass (2019).
Mismatched notions of age and personal responsibility, like those that are so twisted and perverse in Old, had previously lingered in the background of Unbreakable, and become the crux of the tortured Glass. With James McAvoy’s villain from Split now a new, chaotic wrinkle to the relationship between “archenemies” David Dunne and his onetime spiritual guide, the osteogenesis imperfecta-suffering comic book expert and self-styled bad guy, Elijah “Mr. Glass” Price (Samuel L. Jackson), Shyamalan barrels ahead, often elegantly, sometimes clumsily, always compellingly, into the no-man’s land of that pesky issue: are these supposedly superhuman abilities really just delusions of grandeur that feed on suppressed guilt and trauma? Sarah Paulson, as the sinister Dr. Ellie Staple, embodies this imposed doubt, foisting various experiments and psychiatric sessions onto the three, all to dismantle their respective “powers.”
Shyamalan has used his Eastrail Trilogy—named so after the tragic train accident of which David is the only survivor, and thus, realizes his power—to analyze lives intertwined, and even tangled up, with pop culture. Shyamalan himself, both victim to and participant in an industry’s building up and subsequent dismantling of an artistic vision, has been pushed to the fringes of professional filmmaking and has pushed his way back on his own terms. Glass climaxes with a fight in a parking lot, thoroughly deromanticizing its source inspirations while still understanding their foundational status, a complicated middle ground Shyamalan has worked towards with each and every film of his. An “adult” purview as applied to ostensibly juvenile genre material shouldn’t ignore surface pleasures, which Shyamalan indulges via color, off-kilter compositions, and all-around pathos. Dr. Staple is the film’s functional villain, but her presence acts as a rational, if ultimately proven false, counterargument. The argument for his sort of emotionally centered, earnest filmmaking is absorbed into the movies themselves, and his heroes’ hobbled triumphs seem to acknowledge the own uniqueness of his divisive vision.
Glass’s poignant coda calls upon a Shyamalan pet theme—the flow of information, and how it can embolden the characters, as well as terrify them into submission—that becomes the entire fulcrum of Knock At the Cabin. While the world seems to be coming undone, as telegraphed by BBC News and other television programs, Andrew resists the idea that these natural disasters have anything to do with the mysterious intruders, claiming a pre-synchronized schema, where these four “horsemen” have latched onto already burgeoning, entirely visible end-times; the world has been ending, how does climate disaster and disease outbreak signify anything different? As the film reaches around the world along conduits of media, the action stays bound to the cabin, yet another crystallization of Shyamalan’s preoccupation with single-set scenarios, his love of Persona (1966) and High and Low (1963) lovingly apparent. These formal means of independence that buttress Shyamalan’s own rigorous technicality aren’t too dissimilar from Robert Aldrich and The Big Knife (1955), or even Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977), with its specter of annihilation. And yet, Knock At the Cabin is an even richer film, straying from the cruelty of Tremblay’s novel so as to analyze the aftermath of an extreme instance of life-altering faith in action, the enduring lack of resolve that nevertheless affirms the existence of something encouraging connections to Philip K. Dick’s VALIS. (Eric himself, like the novel’s schizophrenic narrator, finds a beacon of cosmic responsibility in a blinding light.) The exigencies of faith find a cinematic complement with the sort of audacious, yet also modest, even self-effacing kind of filmmaking Shyamalan has always trafficked in; like the best of genre filmmakers, he’s always proving how limiting a term that actually is.