Knock at the Cabin

M. Night Shyamalan has lost his mojo — again.

After a promising restart to his career with Split, Glass, and the first half of Old, the filmmaker returns to his knucklehead ways with Knock at the Cabin, a dopey would-be thriller that makes poor use of an intriguing premise and a talented cast.

Indeed, creepiness pervades early on as weapon-wielding Leonard (Dave Bautista), Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird, Old), Redmond (Rupert Grint), and Ardiane (Abby Quinn, Landline) demand entry to the Pennsylvania lakeside rental where Eric (Jonathan Groff), Andrew (Ben Aldridge, Fleabag), and their preteen daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) are vacationing.

The subsequent home invasion is convincingly staged, but it’s the last respectable narrative component in Knock at the Cabin. Other than the crisp framing and cinematography by DPs Jarin Blaschke (The Northman) and Lowell A. Meyer (Servant), the lone thread holding the film together is wondering whether the four intruders are right in their assertion that one of the three family members must sacrifice themself in order to stave off the apocalypse.

It’s a scenario that would seemingly lend itself to thick suspense, but there’s nothing here to quicken one’s pulse and no one to care about. Shoddy character development and cringe-worthy dialogue in Shyamalan films is typically solely the product of the writer/director, and though this time he’s working with the team of Michael Sherman and Steve Desmond, adapting source material by Paul Tremblay, you can’t tell.

Knock at the Cabin is plagued by the same old wooden writing that dogged the filmmaker’s miserable run from Lady in the Water (2006) to The Visit (2015), delivered in a flat, lifeless manner by performers rendered amateurish under Shyamalan’s clueless direction.

If that wasn’t problematic enough, random flashbacks to Eric’s and Andrew’s past disrupt what little flow the present-day narrative has established, and whenever Leonard turns on the TV for “proof” of their consequences, the shoddy news footage undercuts his claims more than supports them.

Indeed, Andrew’s logical theories about what their visitors are truly doing at the cabin are more intriguing than what actually happens, but his conclusions are dismissed in laughable ways, building to a climax that, in the hands of a more capable director, might have hit its intended emotional beats.

For this impotent, theologically suspect story that dangerously gives credence to conspiracy theorists in the MAGA era, Shyamalan is back on probation.

Grade: C-minus. Rated R. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.

(Photo: Universal Pictures)