I get really nervous when horror that I like in other media gets slated for development as a film or series. If it goes right, it adds more really good horror to horror film. But if it goes wrong…it’s like someone playing your favorite song and missing all the notes, or deciding that what it really needs is kazoo and fart noises. You know what it could be, so when it falls short, it’s more disappointing than usual.
So when I found out that the book The Cabin At The End Of The World by Paul Tremblay was getting made into a film, I was happy about it. It packs a wallop, is at moments pretty cinematic even as a book, and avoids a lot of the obvious choices in favor of a relentless ambiguity that leaves you on the hook to the very end and past it. And then I found out it was being directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
Now, I try to avoid talking too much about the specific directors or actors or writers involved in a film because I want to keep my focus on the finished product, and I think horror fandom focuses way too much on personalities. But Shyamalan’s track record has some pretty wide swings - you’ve got really solid efforts like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but then you’ve got films like The Lady In The Water and The Happening, films that generally appear on those “how did this ever get made?” lists. Like, not just less good or mediocre, but actually inviting scorn and derision. When his films are good they’re very good (I really like The Village, do not @ me or X me or whatever it is now), but…I had to wonder which M. Night Shyamalan would be showing up for this.
Well, Knock At The Cabin (who the fuck thought this title was a good idea?) ends up being sort of a mixed bag, but I suspect the low points have little to do with the director. It’s skillfully made, but it’s brought down by some disappointing choices that feel like things studio executives would demand.
Wen, who appears to be eight or nine years old, is vacationing at a lakeside cabin with her fathers Eric and Andrew. She’s catching grasshoppers, naming them, and noting their characteristics in a book like a budding scientist. Eric and Andrew are on the back deck, enjoying the view and some wine and snacks. It’s lovely and idyllic. The idyll does not, however, last long. Wen looks up, and there’s a man walking toward her. He’s very big, dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt, like the Hulk became a Mormon missionary. He tries to strike up a conversation with Wen, but Wen doesn’t talk to strangers. The very large man says she’s right not to talk to strangers, so he introduces himself. His name is Leonard. Leonard asks about her grasshoppers, helps her catch some.
And up the road come three more people, dressed similarly, with long, sharp, homemade implements. You see, Leonard and his acquaintances Redmond, Adriane, and Sabrina, have a very important job to do, and they’re going to need Wen, Andrew, and Eric’s help.
They’re going to prevent the end of the world.
What follows isn’t really the siege film you might think it’s going to be. Sure, you have the trapped family and what appear to be four fanatics obsessed with the idea of sacrifice, but the bulk of the film is really more about the seven of them than anything else. If it’s a siege film, it’s a siege film in which for most (not all) of it, conversation replaces violence. Leonard and the other three are there to convince Eric, Andrew, and Wen that they need to help them, and they come across less like bloodthirsty zealots and more like four frightened people delivering some very bad news on a tight deadline. What they’re asking is unspeakable, but they seem aware that it’s unspeakable and are almost apologetic but no less urgent for all of that. It’s an interesting tack to take. Needless to say, neither Eric nor Andrew are on board, but they’re two very different people- Eric a quiet, reflective man of religious faith, and Andrew a tough, unbelieving pragmatist. But they aren’t cartoons in the slightest. What’s happening at the cabin is punctuated by flashbacks that sketch out their lives together, from early on in their relationship to adopting Wen. These are two men who love each other and who have been shaped differently by the forces with which they have to contend for that mere fact. Cold, silent visits with family. Polite lies to satisfy authority. Bottles across the back of their heads. Adversity has shaped them differently, and so they respond to this adversity differently as well.
Just in terms of execution, this film is put together extremely well. Shyamalan, for whatever you might think of the stories he tells in his films, has a lot of experience directing, and it shows. The dialogue is a little dialogue-y but not so much as to be distracting, and the performances are consistently strong. They manage the difficult feat of making the antagonists much more sympathetic than a lesser film would have them as being, and everyone comes across as a distinct, believable person with their own feelings and doubts and fears and flaws, and it’s in how they talk, how they carry themselves, the looks on their faces. Cinematically, I can best describe this film as very self-assured. Cinematography and lighting do a lot to keep what is effectively a single location from feeling static and adding tension, and frequent use of close-ups keeps the focus on the people, locating the tension in the turmoil that everyone is experiencing. Shot composition does its fair share to communicate relationships, the editing and (mostly) pacing are crisp, and the whole thing rides on a score of minor-key swells that communicates danger and unease without being shrill.
From a technical standpoint, it is a very well-made film. And in terms of faithfulness to the source text (which isn’t always my biggest priority, I know what works on the page doesn’t always work on the screen), it’s very good for the first two acts. Like I said at the start, I feel like the book was already pretty cinematic, and apart from the opening scene, which I felt was shorter and more perfunctory than the book, losing a lot of the mounting dread in the process, it captures how I imagined it while reading pretty well. But the third act is, well, mostly a problem, diverging from the original at the expense of what made the source text so good to begin with.
This story, in either case, centers around sacrifice and apocalyptic endings. And in the source text, there’s a very personal apocalypse - a profound loss, and whether or not there’s an actual global apocalypse is left more uncertain. The film shifts the first in service of an obvious, definite answer to the second, and I think the film suffers as a result. The source text doesn’t give us any easy answers, so when the film does, it feels smaller somehow. And it really goes to town in the last act mopping up and eliminating any trace of the ambiguity that was so central to the original story. Not only was it not a cut-and-dried good-versus-evil story, but it was also a story that hinged very much on the tug of war between belief and doubt. And by the end of this film, there isn’t a trace of doubt left, not even about the smallest things, giving us something much safer, more sanitized, in exactly the kind of film that shouldn't feel safe and sanitized. The more I think about it, the more it pisses me off.
This was not indie horror. This was big-studio horror, with a big-name director and at least one name that would bring in box office. I can only imagine that somewhere, some studio suit with a deficiency of spine passed down a note saying that those things had to change because nobody ever went broke assuming audiences were dumb and thin-skinned and couldn’t handle ambiguity or seriously heavy feelings. It’s something that feels unique to the U.S., this idea of horror as being limited to safe thrill rides instead of confrontational art, and no, I’m not angry, just disappointed. No, wait, I am angry.
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