Knock at the Cabin: For Shyamalan, Spirituality Trumps Suspense

This article contains full spoilers for Knock at the Cabin.

For almost 25 years now, M. Night Shyamalan has been one of our most fascinating directors. The 1999 horror film The Sixth Sense was not Shyamalan’s first directed feature (the little-known dramas Praying with Anger and Wide Awake came before), but it was the movie that launched him into the stratosphere essentially overnight. From then on, Shyamalan was one of the few marquee directors with a signature style that was largely recognizable to the general audience, with his movies often being in either the horror or thriller genres, involving supernatural occurrences, and having mind-melting twist endings. Spooky suspense, if you will.

But is that the whole truth? Is there an element of his storytelling style that’s been downplayed, one that could be considered largely responsible for his movies polarizing audiences and critics ever since his first runaway hit? His latest offering, Knock at the Cabin (review), seems purposefully designed to answer this question. Despite being as spooky and suspenseful as you’d expect a Shyamalan film to be, it also pushes the themes of spirituality that have been present in almost his entire filmography to the forefront. And given how the movie plays out, it appears Shyamalan is making a definitive statement about what he’s always wanted audiences to take away from his films. What’s going on here? Let’s take a look.

The Shyamalan Spectrum

To best understand M. Night Shyamalan, we have to situate his body of work on a spectrum between his two defining creative impulses: spiritual sentimentality, and the aforementioned spooky suspense. All of his movies fall somewhere on the line between these two things, with much of his early era, comprising The Sixth Sense to Lady in the Water, leaning more to the former, and his recent era of The Visit to Old leaning more towards the latter. Old in particular was something of a reinvention for him, moving so far over into his horror bonafides with its use of dark comedy and body horror that it felt like he was perhaps ready to move into a new creative space almost wholly removed from the likes of Signs or The Village. However, Knock at the Cabin is as sharp a reorientation as it’s possible to make.

Knock at the Cabin is primarily concerned with a group of four home invaders who break into a cabin where husbands Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) are vacationing with their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui), and take them hostage. Leonard (Dave Bautista), the leader of the invading group, explains that they have received some kind of divine visions that have convinced them that the family must choose one of their own to sacrifice to prevent an impending apocalypse. A tense premise, to be certain, but it quickly becomes clear that the true dramatic question of this exercise isn’t so much about who they will choose to sacrifice or why, but about whether Eric and Andrew are capable of believing Leonard and his cohorts in time to save the world, and if they do indeed feel that the world is worth saving at the cost of a person they love.

To best understand Shyamalan, we have to situate his body of work on a spectrum between his two defining creative impulses: spiritual sentimentality, and spooky suspense.

The religious allusions to the Last Judgment of Christian theology are obvious; at one point, Eric even outright refers to the invaders as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There is also a recurring question of whether or not Eric saw a “being of light” when Redmond, the invader to be sacrificed after the family gives its first refusal, is killed. Belief is a central motif for the entire movie, with Andrew repeatedly claiming the whole thing is an elaborate hoax even after seeing news reports about natural disasters that match Leonard’s predictions, and trying to poke holes in the personal stories each invader gives as they beg the family to make a choice in time to save their lives. It all makes for great thriller material, but the filmmaking choices from both a technical and narrative standpoint reinforce that this is a story more concerned with faith than it is fear.

The Tenet of Tension

The opening scene of Knock at the Cabin is an excellent summation of Shyamalan’s approach not just to this film in particular, but to his storytelling style in general. The movie begins with Wen, a young girl enjoying her time in nature as she catches grasshoppers in a jar and talks to them. It’s an easy in to emotional investment in the audience, and a reminder of one of Shyamalan’s great unsung gifts: a wonderful ability to direct child actors. She is then approached by Leonard, who when asked what he’s doing here, says he’s come to “be your friend.” It’s an ominous statement given by a stranger with a figure as imposing as Dave Bautista’s, but one that is, in many ways, factually accurate. The following conversation of them sitting together is mostly shot in tight close-ups, suggesting a truthful connection, but the shots are often tilted and slightly off-kilter, generating a tense atmosphere. There’s something honest and approachable about Leonard, even as his presence warns of a looming threat.

Bautista is perfectly cast in the role of Leonard, embodying the family’s worry of physical danger while contrasting this with a personality of unrelenting calm and consideration. Although Leonard has broken into the family’s vacation home to make clear that one of them has to die, he never once becomes a genuine physical threat to the main characters unless he’s defending himself. He is overly apologetic about the whole affair, and appears to be a kind, good-hearted man who is absolutely devastated by the holy mission he believes he’s been given. Bautista’s casting also highlights how this is a story about belief, because he doesn’t come across as the sort of person who it would be easy to believe if he came to your front door and started knocking, demanding to be let in. Perhaps a less intimidating spokesperson would have been easier to sympathize with, but also perhaps would have been easier to dismiss.

The use of Bautista calls to mind how Shyamalan has long been a director capable of drawing out career-best performances from some of our most talented and interesting actors. From Toni Collette as embattled mother Lynn Sear, who is wrestling with her son’s affliction while also struggling with unresolved issues with her own mother in The Sixth Sense, to Samuel L. Jackson as the soft-spoken supervillain Mr. Glass, who comes to accept his purpose in life as David Dunn’s antithesis in Unbreakable, to Bryce Dallas Howard as the impossibly caring blind woman Ivy Walker, who is willing to brave an unseen world to save the man she loves in The Village, to James McAvoy as the various personalities of Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man who can inspire pity or terror depending on which alter is currently in control in Split, Shyamalan’s best films provide a canvas for performers to dig deep and inspire complex emotions in the audience. Knock at the Cabin continues this trend, but it also more substantively provides Shyamalan himself an opportunity to clear up the biggest misconceptions about his approach to art.

Peace and Purpose

There is no twist ending in Knock at the Cabin. It’s not the first post-Sixth Sense Shyamalan film to not employ one, with Signs having more of a dramatic reveal than a conventional “twist.” Unlike Signs, and indeed unlike most of Shyamalan’s films, Knock at the Cabin is an adaptation, namely of Paul G. Tremblay’s 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World. Despite stemming from a previous artist’s work, the main narrative concerns of Knock at the Cabin feel distinctly Shyamalan in conception, and the way he changes the novel’s ending for the film comes off like an artist being inspired by another but choosing to walk down a path more true to not just his own sensibilities but how he wants his audience to perceive his work. Specifically, while the ending of Knock at the Cabin is not a rejection of his horror/thriller roots, it is a declaration that his most important motif is his characters coming to peace with their purpose in this world, a purpose that is often ascribed to a power greater than themselves.

The ending of Knock at the Cabin is a declaration that his most important motif is his characters coming to peace with their purpose in this world.

In the novel, Eric and Andrew reject the sacrifice because of Wen’s accidental death not counting and choose to let the world burn. In the film, Wen doesn’t die, and after Leonard commits suicide to trigger the final stage of the apocalypse, Eric and Andrew argue in the last few minutes before the point of no return about what to do. At first Andrew is insistent the world doesn’t deserve their sacrifice, but Eric makes it clear that he wants to give up his own life so that Wen doesn’t have to grow up in an empty world. It is a truly selfless act, and one he makes freely and happily because he fully believes not just in what is happening around them, but that such a choice will make the world better for the people he loves more so than him desperately trying to hold onto them. It’s a completely different ending for the story than the novel envisioned, but it’s also the only one that would line up with Shyamalan’s style.

From the Eastrail 177 trilogy being about a small collection of superpowered beings coming to understand that their afflictions weren’t mistakes, to Signs featuring an ex-priest who regains his faith after what he initially thought was a senseless tragedy, to the eponymous settlement in The Village fostering a truly pure love in the generation who grew up in it despite the sins of its founders, Shyamalan’s most poignant films are all built around the spiritual idea of accepting a purpose more important than what you may have initially wanted. It’s a basic sermon, perhaps one of the most common in existence, but given how often Shyamalan’s work is misinterpreted in bad faith, Knock at the Cabin proves that it’s still one worth listening to.

Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.