Say what you like about M Night Shyamalan, he's found his groove and he sticks to it: his dubious flirtation with sci-fi and fantasy from about ten years ago seems to be over and he's found a comfortable niche making modestly-budgeted sort-of horror-adjacent thrillers which frequently resemble episodes of The Twilight Zone. Perhaps it is he and not Jordan Peele who is this generation's answer to Rod Serling (or possibly last generation's answer, given that The Sixth Sense is close to being a quarter of a century old). Then again, given Shyamalan's penchant for (or, depending on how you feel about it, insistence on) casting himself in his movies, maybe he just wants to be Alfred Hitchcock.

Shyamalan is back again with his new movie Knock at the Cabin. This is a bit of a novelty for him, as for once it's not a script he originated himself: it's based on the novel The Cabin at the End of the World, by Gavin Tremblay. It opens with a sweet little girl named Wen (Kristen Cui) catching grasshoppers outside the cabin that she and her parents have rented for a holiday (one thing about this film: it's not necessarily a great advert for Airbnb). Everything is scenic and lovely.

But lo! What is this, moving through the trees towards her? It's Dave Bautista, looking as ever like a piece of the landscape that has slipped its moorings and started wandering about. On this occasion Bautista is playing Leonard, who initially seems to be a mild-mannered, friendly man who just wants to be nice to Wen and her family. Then his friends turn up, carrying home-made axes and pole-arms, and suddenly everything becomes a lot less relaxing. Leonard's friends include Nikki Amuka-Bird, who appears to have successfully transitioned from dodgy BBC genre TV to dodgy Shyamalan genre movies (she was also in Old), and Rupert Grint (nice to see him again).

Wen and her parents (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge) take cover in the cabin, but soon enough Leonard and his friends are smashing their way in and the two men find themselves tied to chairs. But this is not the exercise in reflexive redneck homophobia they initially assume it is. Their captors seem genuinely apologetic and slightly embarrassed about everything that's going on, and explain that the family has to make a grave decision very soon if they want the apocalypse to be averted, anyway...

It's slightly awkward to say much more without entering the land of spoilers, as is not uncommon with a Shyamalan movie. Suffice to say we are in familiar territory here, although it's hard to be sure whether the film contains one of the director's trademark twists – basically, the thing can go one of two ways: either the line Leonard and his chums are spinning about the family's grim, apocalypse-related responsibilities is for real, or it isn't. For either of these obvious possibilities to be true hardly constitutes a surprise – but it's not quite clear whether Shyamalan would agree on this point.

So we're left with a slightly oppressive, never-knowingly-underwrought chamber piece (for the most part), where you're usually pretty sure of what's going to happen next. In these terms, it is not a terrible film – Shyamalan has always been more capable as a director than a writer, and he manages to dance around some moments of potential graphic nastiness with great dexterity. He also manages to put one over on Zack Snyder, amongst others, by getting a genuinely quite impressive acting performance out of Dave Bautista. Nevertheless, you are left slightly bemused at the end, wondering what the point of the exercise has been.

It's definitely Shyamalan's name on the charge-sheet for this (along with his co-scripters) as this is one of those film adaptations which radically parts company with the source material well before the end. It's such a big change that it raises the question of to what extent this really qualifies as an adaptation at all. It certainly opens up a whole slew of questions as to what kind of film Shyamalan thinks he is making.

The striking thing about the film as things currently stand is the fact that the family being menaced is a non-traditional one, something the script doesn't shy away from addressing. Eric and Andrew assume that they have been attacked because of their lifestyle, and a series of flashbacks reveals all the compromises and accommodations they have had to make in their relationship to get to this point. In the novel, this seems to be a major theme, and profoundly informs how the story resolves.

Changing the final act of the story in the way that Shyamalan has fundamentally alters this, making the nature of their relationship and its history much less significant to the story – the most positive spin you can put on this is that it places a couple of gay characters centre-stage in a movie where you wouldn't usually expect to find them. Given how the story pans out, however, this is a really Pollyanna-ish interpretation, and the film more readily lends itself to a troublingly reactionary reading – the fact that Eric and Andrew never actually show any physical signs of affection for one another perhaps indicates the film is keen to avoid unsettling audiences who don't have a problem with homosexuality, as long as they don't have to look at it. If someone with entrenched homophobic beliefs turned up to this movie, the chances are they would not be that outraged or offended by it. (There has been at least one report of a screening of Knock at the Cabin where an audience member cheered every time one of the gay characters was attacked, and proceeded to sing hymns throughout the closing credits.)

As I say, you really do wonder what Shyamalan – who seems like a decent, intelligent, responsible guy – is doing making a film which lends itself to this kind of interpretation, even if that isn't the director's intent. As I was actually watching the film, I found myself wondering what Shyamalan himself thinks it's about – probably something to do with the transcendent power of love and our capacity for self-sacrifice. I am pretty sure this is not what Gavin Tremblay was thinking of when he wrote the original book. Shyamalan may believe he's made the story more accessible to a wider audience, but it still seems rather like a piece of narrative vandalism. As a result, the fact that Knock at the Cabin is really quite predictable and never what you'd call exciting or scary is a secondary issue. Does the English language contain the word 'misadaptation'? Because it should, and if it does, this is practically the type specimen of what a misadaptation is. For an experienced and often capable film-maker like M Night Shyamalan to be responsible for something like this is baffling and slightly worrying.

Awix

27.02.23 Front Page

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