Knock-On Effects

Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan arrived in the zeitgeist with a few great movies in a row (there's wide agreement on The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable; a bit less on Signs, and rather few who would continue the "great" list beyond that). But a wildly uneven string of films since then have led to where his movies are hardly "must see" anymore, and outright "must not see" to many. I'd put myself in the camp of "would consider," on a case by case basis.

Shyamalan's latest effort was one I decided to try, largely for reasons having nothing to do the man himself. Knock at the Cabin is one of his few movies to be adapted from existing material, as opposed to being an original story and script. This is obscured by the title change from the novel on which it's based.

The Cabin at the End of the World is a book I read years ago and mostly liked. I said at the time that it seemed tailor-made to become a film... and unsurprisingly, had already been optioned for exactly that. Still, I had no idea, when I first saw the slightly enigmatic trailer for Knock at the Cabin, that it was that movie.

Indeed, the first half to two-thirds of the movie are an incredibly faithful adaptation that follows the book almost exactly. I was reluctant to say much about the plot of the book years ago, but will now say more about the movie: a gay couple and their daughter are staying at a remote cabin when four people burst onto the scene with a wild demand. They say the apocalypse is nigh, and the only thing that can avert it is for the family of three to decide, willingly, to sacrifice one of themselves. The demand is naturally refused, but the extreme claim is increasingly accompanied by extreme proof. The question of just what is real gradually leads to the question, will this family make such a horrible choice?

My review of Paul Tremblay's book wasn't sky high; I liked it, but didn't love it. Most of my reservations had to do with choices in the writing style more than the plotting, but however you slice it, I did feel there was room for improvement. So I didn't necessarily mind (in principle) that the movie diverged from the book in the third act. But for how closely the rest of the movie follows the book, it's striking how little the ending does. I guess you could call this the Shyamalan signature "twist ending?" ; the twist is that if you've read the book and think you know the ending you're going to get... surprise!

In essence, the film departs by refusing to include the darkest story turn in the book. And for a movie that wants to play to a broad audience (and it did; this was the movie that finally dethroned the Avatar sequel from #1 at the box office), I sort of get why Shyamalan and his script co-writers didn't want to go there. However, from that big change flows many subsequent changes that I think pile up to undermine some of the best elements of the book.

When I blogged about the book, I noted that it felt like LGBT+ representation done in a satisfying way, because the fact that the couple at the heart of story was gay felt incidental to the story. The movie version made me rethink that assessment and realize how wrong I was. The way the book ended centers entirely on how this couple feels about how the world has sometimes treated them. The book still retains some plot threads about bigotry and "straight privilege," but in the real-world spectrum of how "conformist vs. defiant" LGBT+ people and culture can and should be, the movie manages to come down squarely on the "conformist" side where the book was proudly "defiant." Basically, it made me more aware of the novel's subtext (some of which, in retrospect, wasn't that "sub") by bulldozing over it.

That sounds largely negative... yet I can't claim the movie offers nothing in exchange. Chiefly, it offers a great performance by Dave Bautista as Leonard. He's the character doing the titular knocking at the cabin, and it's great to see him in a role like this. While the film is of course leveraging for tension what an intimidating presence he is, the character's behavior runs counter to this imposing exterior. Leonard is a gentle giant, empathetic and sad, and Bautista really gets to act in this part, in a way I haven't really seen from him in other movies.

It's great that the couple in the story is played by two actors both openly gay in real life, Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge. I don't happen to subscribe to the notion that gay roles must be cast this way. (Actors "pretend" to love people all the time, and I don't see this as different. Also: if the reverse were true, and queer actors weren't cast in straight roles, their parts would sadly dry up.) Still, it feels important to me in this story that these roles are cast that way, and I think Groff and Aldridge work well off each other.

All told, though, my reservations about the movie are a bit greater than they were for the book. I'd still probably come down just on the side of recommending it, with a B-. But I wish the moments of levity felt less forced, I wish all the performances were as strong as Dave Bautista's, and I wish that the ending retained more of the defiant spirit of the original novel. (I guess you could say the title is different for a reason.)