While vacationing, a girl and her parents are taken hostage by armed strangers who demand that the family make a choice to avert the apocalypse.
Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Kristen Cui, Abby Quinn & Rupert Grint.
M. Night Shyamalan is the strangest of directors, often producing some of the worst yet most interesting films in modern cinema today. Although his entire filmography isn’t a miss, with his unbreakable trilogy being one of his highlights and the fantastic Sixth Sense. Knock at the Cabin is a mix of greatness and poor storytelling, as well as being one of the most conflicting films in a while.
The easiest aspect to talk about are the positives. The directing by M Night is consistently great, tense and claustrophobic. Conveying this sense of independing doom for the entire runtime. Complimented incredibly well by the entire cast’s fantastic performances, particularly Dave Bautista & Jonathan Groff. Whom are both layered & complex with their mannerisms.
The score is haunting and gripping, allowing audiences minds to run wild and create scenarios to happen which ultimately don’t. This way it puts audiences on the edge of their seats for the entire runtime, which can sometimes be a fault. Relying on one aspect to carry a lot of the concepts independing doom feeling can be rather cheap. This comes to the screenplay, which is far from fleshed out and very often without any meaning. It has wonky dialogue in moments but for the most part consistent. But it’s many ideas that never lead to anything left me with a thousand questions and disappointment with where the story ended up.
It’s annoyingly a whole lot of something that leads to nothing and this was the greatest disappointment from the director with tons of ideas. I wish I could talk about ‘Knock at the Cabin’ more but it isn’t worth the extra words. It is devilishly entertaining, but part of that fun came from the expectation of something great to happen. It’s a fun watch with wonderful technical elements and performances, but it’s screenplay is its big letdown.
