Knock at the Cabin, M. Night Shyamalan’s adaptation of a 2018 novel by Paul Tremblay, mostly registers as a meditation on the size and scope of Dave Bautista’s head. The WWE star turned screen actor (Guardians of the Galaxy, Blade Runner 2049, Glass Onion) stars as Leonard, a gentle giant who—along with three other strangers—interrupts the cabin vacation of a couple and their young daughter with a bizarre demand: if they don’t choose to kill one member of their family, the apocalypse will commence. (After an early, firm “No” is followed by news reports of cataclysmic tsunamis, we begin to wonder if Leonard’s claims might be true.) Bautista knows how to use his gargantuan body to achieve a particular effect, often drawing suspense from his massive girth while using a soft voice to counter the physicality. He makes Leonard—who constantly apologizes for bringing this on the family—a threat you feel like you could hug. Shyamalan, meanwhile, has fun with Bautista’s frame within the frame, employing extreme close-ups that only allow the middle of his face to fit. There’s also an ingenious sequence in which the camera is placed behind Leonard’s head as he talks to the parents (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge) while they’re tied up in chairs. In the first shot, one of the dads is on the left half of the screen in the background, while Bautista’s head takes up the right half of the screen in the foreground. In the next shot, we get the opposite: a dad on the right, Bautista’s head on the left. The mise-en-scene separates the parents, eerily emphasizing their distress. If Knock at the Cabin is mid-tier Shyamalan, at best, it may be because I was more taken with these formal choices than the story, which riffs on the Book of Revelation in ways that feel fairly perfunctory. I did appreciate the final moments, though, which resist any sort of Shyamalan twist and instead rely on an emotional, diegetic needle drop that I won’t spoil here.
(2/1/2023)
