M. Night Shyamalan's Knock At The Cabin has now released in theatres, and it's quite the
interesting adaptation of Paul Tremblay's The Cabin At The End Of The World.
There's a big difference to the ending of the film and it's
something that Shyamalan clearly had his own answer to surrounding the source material.
In this explained analysis, I'm going to be giving
you my breakdown of Knock At The cabin, discussing the plot, the ending twist and the differences
from the book.
There will be spoilers in this video, so if you haven't watched M. Night
Shyamalan's new film yet, then I would recommend checking it out before watching my analysis.
Before I get into it though, if you want to see more breakdowns on upcoming films, tv
shows, and auteur driven work, then don't forget
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But without further a do, lets dive into my explained video for Knock
At The Cabin.
So M. Night Shyamalan has had some big hits and also some not so great films in his extended
career.
But he's always managed to grip audiences with interesting setups, emotionally
wounded characters and of course, the final crazy twists.
His new film, Knock At The Cabin has been adapted from Paul Tremblay's horror novel
The Cabin at the End of the World, and involves the wild events that take place after
a group of strangers interrupt a family's holiday and present them with an urgent decision.
They must sacrifice and kill one of their own
to prevent the apocalypse from happening.
With Shyamalan being known for shattering audience expectations in the final act of
his films, this one has a twist that is more natural
towards how he answers certain topics from the book.
But before we get to that, let's discuss a bit more about the setup of his latest movie,
which we learn takes a traditional home invasion thriller and turns it into an apocalyptic
reasoning.
So Husbands Eric and Andrew are with their adoptive daughter Wen in a remote cabin in
New Hampshire, having left the city behind for a well deserved break.
It's quite the heavenly location, full of fields with lots of greenery,
a lake for diving in and a Cabin where they can put their minds at ease.
We open the film with Wen who is outside trying to catch
grasshoppers, and she is awkwardly approached by dave Bautista's Leonard, who in M. Night's
past film Split, may have been there to abduct her.
But this seems quite different, because Leonard tries to make friends with her and
essentially tells her that he wants to speak to her dads about the important decision that
her and they will have to make.
But before things can go smoothly, Wen spots the group of people
that Leonard has brought with him, that while we learn are mostly polite are armed with
terrifying weapons too.
She decides to run inside and let her dads know about what is coming,
and Eric and Andrew eventually get that dreaded Knock at the Cabin.
In realising that they are armed, they panic and try to call to the
police, but they can't do that or even make a run for it because the phone line has been
severed, there's no signal in the area and the tires of their car have been slashed.
The strangers end up breaking into the Cabin and
the family are soon tied up by the four of them.
And this is where the film starts to turn from horifying into being more of an existential
one.
The visitors, which include Dave Bautista's Leonard, Rupert Grint's Redmond, Sabrina and
Adriane, reveal themselves as being apocalypic messengers with an important message for
the family.
And that is that the world will end with the oceans swelling, plagues taking over and the
sky falling like planes of glass.
But they also say that it can be prevented, if
Eric, Andrew or their adopted daughter Wen, choose to sacrifice one of their own.
The apologetic messengers bring the urgency that the film needs and it's through them
that the scale of the plot really starts to unveil.
They introduce themselves with Sabrina claiming to be a nurse, Leonard claiming to
be a teacher and Adriane being a single mum that's trying to protect her son, laying down
their surprisingly ordinary lives.
It's only Redmond’s appearance and mention of a troubled
history that makes them question, as Andrew thinks that he is the same redneck that once
attacked him in a bar for being gay, a moment left him scarred and also quite against doing
this to save others.
So Eric and Andrew look at these strangers and ask whether they are extremists, mentally
unstable or a group of people that actually know something about the end
of the world and want them to help save it.
In the lives that this couple have lived, which includes flashbacks such as the one
where Andrew's parents meet Eric, it makes it clear
to us of the homosexual anxieties involved, and why resistance is their predicted action.
But while Eric suffered a severe head injury during the intial break in, him and his partner
show their urge to not give in until one of them eventually becomes persuaded.
And this all begins when the strangers begin to kill
themselves off, one by one, with each death putting in motion a certain apocalyptic event.
We learn that these deaths are essentially slowing down the apocalypse so that Eric and
Andrew have time and might be convinced to sacrifice one of their own to stop the whole
thing.
First is Rupert Grint's Redmond, and we follow by watching tv footage of a tidal wave
killing many people on the coast.
Next is Adriane, followed by news footage of a bird flu rapidly killing people on the
planet too.
But even with half of the strangers already being
sacrificied, and two apocalypses taking place as a result, Eric and Andrew continue to stall
on making their decision.
While Eric does start to by into their theories as the film goes
on, Andrew is still adamant that everything is a hoax.
And this is only escalated after he thought that Redmond was the man that assaulted him
in his past.
He says to Leonard that the rest of the world can die because they haven't
done any good for him, showing how the pain of his past experiences have inflicted a deep-routed
trauma.
Regardless of these understandable reservations, ones that even Leonard and the
messengers can understand, as things progress it becomes increasingly clear that the apocalyptic
events are really happening.
Andrew and Eric are secretly untied by Wen, with Andrew
able to get the gun out of his now-slashed car, and he eventually uses it on Sabrina.
Planes start to drop from the sky on the news and this
is then later seen around their Cabin once they begin to confront Leonard.
In his final act before killing himself, he tells Eric and Andrew that they have one last
chance to prevent the apocalypse and after he dies there will
only be a few minutes before their time is up.
While Eric and Andrew are still not convinced, Leonard kills himself and this causes the
sky to go black and lightning to strike all around
them.
So they are once again left with a now final chance to make an important decision.
Before we come to that final decision, it's key to note that these events play out quite
differently in the movie than how they do in the book.
Yes much of the story plays out as it does in the original material, but the final
act is reworked in an explorative way, as if Shyamalan gives his version and answer
to the more supernatural occurances.
In the source material, the ending events result in a cautionary
statement about the struggle of protecting your children from a quite bleak future.
When Andrew escapes to fetch his gun, his and
Eric's adopted daughter Wen is accidentally shot and killed.
But we learn that her death doesn’t count in saving the world, as the act was a mistake
and not done by choice.
Eric and Andrew eventually beat their strangers, and
it ends with them together, with a sacrifice not succesfully being made.
That death also affects Sabrina, who kills Leonard before leading
the couple to Redmond's car, she reminds them that they can still prevent the apocalypse
if they choose too and then kills herself.
Eric does consider following through, but Andrew
persuades him not too, saying that they shouldn't obey a god that doesn't accept Wen's death
as a sacrifice.
So the couple head to Redmond's car and leave united.
There's more ambiguity surrounding the apocalypse in the book, and
it eventually leaves readers with a decision to be made over whether the messengers were
telling the truth.
Whereas in the film, the apocalypse is clearly a thing, the messengers
were telling the truth and one of the two partners does reach a heartbreaking end.
Coming to the end of the movie though, instead of being accidently shot, Wen survives the
final scuffle.
And instead, Eric decides that he wants to be the sacrifice after watching
societies collapse.
As expected, Andrew begs him to consider that the strangers played pre-recorded broadcasts
on the tv, but Eric confesses that he was convinced way earlier after
witnessing their ordinary behaviour with them.
And then when he also sees that the apocalypse was real and it eventually reaches their backyard,
there's only one end in his mind.
After some time, Andrew agrees to his wish, shoots
him and realises that there can only be a future if he stops the apocalypse by having
a future with his adoptive daughter.
Andrew and Wen reach Redmond’s car, and drive back towards
a wrecked city in the distance, but first they stop at a diner and see that the people
in there are crowded around a TV that's showing images
of the destruction from the events that took place.
It's clear that the apocalypse has been prevented and it's time for civilisation to basically
repair in the future.
And speaking of that future, the final scene between Andrew
and Wen suggests a brighter period in the time ahead for them both too.
We did see a flashforward of them during Eric's final plea for
death, and they appeared to be happy with Wen moved on in her life and settling down
in a new home.
She's with Andrew and he is equally happy towards this big step forward for her in the
future.
So it's a quite wholesome ending and to top it off, the final moments of the film show
them driving away from the diner listening to Boogie Shoes by KC and the Sunsine Band,
which is the track that they and Eric listened too joyfully on the way to the Cabin.
It’s definitelly a more conclusive ending than the one that was in the book, because
rather than showing us a couple regrettably heading back
into a likely chaotic world, the movie shows a parent and a daughter having a potential
bright future ahead.
One thing to keep in mind is that M. Night's film does show that the world
is permanently scarred, whether that be because of the many deaths aroundsthe world, or because
of the death that our remining characters will have to live with.
It's not a Shymalan twist that will cause movie debates, but a twist on the source material
that provides his answer to those unanswered questions in a different
way.
Like I touched on though, it gave us something that was still quite devastating, because
it used the themes of the book to showcase another distressing conclusion.
But that was my breakdown and analysis for M. Night Shyamalan's Knock At The Cabin.
Overall, I quite liked the director's new film, and while I wouldn't say it was his
best work by any margain, I did once again appreciate how Shyamalan
could take a very closed-in environment with limited characters and breathe a sense of
scale into it with the storytelling.
Yes he has done that on numerous occasions in past
films and the book had a lot of this material for him to use, but from a filmmaking side
of things, the director has a good habbit of taking
something that appears quite small and conveying the stakes in an urgent way.
I also liked the way he used close up cinematography, particularly with Dave Bautista, to really
show the inner anxieties in making this group of innocent
people do something unimaginable.
I especially loved the camera work in the scene that involved the killing Redmond, with
Shyamalan tilting the camera as Leonard lifts his tool
to make you feel just as sick and dizzy as those in the room.
It's definitely pshycological and emotionally sickening at times, but I cannot
deny that the filmmaker continuously finds a way to bring the story's central themes
to life by putting you in the shoes of the characters.
On the other hand, I can completely understand if readers of the book are a bit
dissapointed by elements such as the ending changes, and I myself did find the conclusion
to be quite standard considering the questions that we're posed in the buildup.
But I guess that the ending did still supply the harrowing answers that this story had
on the pages too.
While it's not the most memorable of endings and I expected more from it, I still appreciate
Shyamalan's filmmaking and the way he takes what appears to be small and makes it important.
I think that's a good tool to have in Hollywood and with Knock At The Cabin also
having good performances, decent writting and well shot scenes, it at least makes it
a worthy theatrical experience.
I'm giving Knock At The Cabin a rating of 7.5 out of 10.
But to those who have seen M. Night's latest film, what are your thoughts on all the events
that went down and if you have read the book, how do you
feel towards the changes that were made.
Let me know down below in the comments section.
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