M. Night Shyamalan's 'Knock at the Cabin' is a sometimes tense but largely cumbersome parable about modern families, writes TIME critic Stephanie Zacharek (szacharek)
would violate the vow of near-silence required of nearly everyone who sees a Shyamalan movie before the general public does. Shyamalan and fellow screenwriters Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman have adapted the movie from Paul G. Tremblay’s 2018 horror novelthough it appears they have taken significant liberties with the ending. There’s some knockabout violence, though the grislier events happen off-camera, suggested rather than shown.
Yet why, exactly, has this particular family been chosen by the grand, string-pulling whomever to be the saviors of the world? That’s a question the movie never quite answers, though it’s hinted that the love between Wen, Daddy Andrew, and Daddy Eric is so intense and pure that it only stands to reason they’ve been chosen as humanity’s last hope. The movie’s finest scenes are its flashbacks, showing Eric and Andrew doing both average and special things.
Aldridge and Groff are good enough actors to pull all of this off without undue sentimentality. Yet the movie around them vibrates with special pleading. Every other minute it beams a signal that announces, “Look at thesegay dads!” And naturally, they’re the ones who, in their selflessness—and despite, or maybe because of, their history of being persecuted for who they are—are asked to make the ultimate offering to the vengeful god who rules the movie.
Early in the film, Wen explains to Leonard in exasperation that a guidance counselor at her school repeatedly gushes how awesome it is that she has two fathers. Yet the movie does the same thing, penning this modern but not so out-of-the ordinary family into their own little petting zoo. Shyamalan seems to be in a particularly pensive mood here, ruminating on the fact that we’re destroying our world, but also, it seems, hoping that love, along with a change in our thinking, might save it.
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