Many years ago - certainly long before many of the people I saw Knock At The Cabin with were born - an unknown director made one of the best horror films of the year.
It was called The Sixth Sense and since then writer-director M Night Shyamalan has been mostly dumping on its memory.
The Sixth Sense famously had one of the great switcheroo endings, that literally nobody saw coming. So, Shyamalan felt he had to try and do it again. And again. And nothing ruins a surprise ending like the whole audience expecting it.
Photo: Screenshot
And the trouble with the big switches in Signs, The Village, the horrible Happening – look out for the trees! – and Lady in the Water was they weren’t a patch on the original.
So every couple of years another film, another disappointment. I mean, they’re quite well made – the sound is always particularly good – but they’re generally so stupid. Stupid and earnest.
Come in Knock At The Cabin.
Unlike most of Shyamalan’s films, this one is based on a book by someone else, with a rather better title, The Cabin at the End of the World. Knock at the Cabin simply means they can put a lot of scary knocks all through the trailer.
At the start of the film, angelic kid Wen meets a sinister stranger, played by former wrestler Dave Bautista.
Bautista is best known – in my case only known – playing the lunkhead Guardian in Guardians of the Galaxy, but he clearly has acting aspirations.
Hence his tendency to wear glasses in most of his roles now, and in Knock At The Cabin he takes the lion’s share of the exposition.
Well, I say “exposition”… After several of his paragraph-long explanations to young Wen and her two dads, Eric and Andrew, I was left more bewildered than before.
Why does he have to knock so loud at the door if, as he claims, he means the household no harm? And who are the other three with him, including Ron Weasley himself, Rupert Grint.
Before we launch into why exactly these four sinister people have barged in, we keep flashing back – to the birth of young Wen and her adoption by Eric and Andrew, to a fight in a bar, to them cheerfully driving to the cabin.
Let’s get back to some exposition.
Lionel – Bautista – seems more interested in whetting our appetite than actually exposing anything.
Lionel and the other three horsemen take time out – stop taking time out, for goodness sake! – to explain that they’re ordinary people who met in extraordinary circumstances.
Their one intention – I can hardly bring myself to tell you – is to prevent the Apocalypse.
Now I don’t know about you, but my least favourite thing in a horror film – apart from being occasionally woken up by loud noises – is the ‘Unattributed Prophecy’. The ‘legend tells’, ‘fulfill your destiny.’ In this case, ‘you have to choose’. If you don’t, the world will end.
Really? Says who?
Says never you mind, needless to say. And every time Bautista says any more it makes it worse. Families throughout history have chosen, he Davesplains.
This of course is the thought process of every conspiracy loopy ever, and the fact that Knock At The Cabin pretends to take it seriously is the second worst thing about the film.
The worst thing about it, of course, is the title. Nobody knocks at a cabin. You knock at the cabin door, surely.
You can certainly knock a film called Knock At The Cabin. I’ve just done it. But knocking at a cabin is a pointless exercise. OK, perhaps it isn’t such a bad title after all.
