Accompanied by Wen, the little girl they adopted, Eric and Andrew stay in a chalet located in the heart of the forest. The tranquility of vacationers is undermined when four strangers arrive, as mismatched as they are hallucinated, and according to whom the two men are the only ones who can save the world from an imminent end. How? By sacrificing one of the three members of their family: Cornelian dilemma in perspective. And the four thieves to explain themselves, and to explain themselves again, and again… His logorrhal side is only one of the many problems of Knock at the Cabin (The Lonely Shack), the new film from cult filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan.
Cult, we specify, not in the sense of “John Carpenter is a cult filmmaker whose work has been reassessed on the rise over the decades”. Cult in the sense that M. Night Shyamalan has worshipers ready to bite anyone who finds fault with any of his movies (critic faith).
However, if it is obvious when one consults his filmography, it is that the best rubs shoulders with the worst. Thus will we take pleasure in revisiting The Sixth Sense (The sixth sense), Unbreakable (The Indestructible) or signs (Signs), when we prefer to forget Lady in the Water (The Lady of the Water), The Last Airbender (The Last Airbender), or The Happening (The Event) – film with which, alas, Knock at the Cabin shares many similarities, including hyperfixed directing of actors and way of delivering dialogue. Dialogue in this case heavy, superabundant and overexplicative.
Faced with this soporific apocalypse, we sometimes think of this bad joke with a thousand variations: “Knock! Knock!… Who’s there? “. If he failed, Knock at the Cabin is not, however, the director’s worst film. after-earth (After Earth).
Shyamalan, for example, manages to instill and nourish a tension which, here and there, becomes unbearable… provided that the chatter does not come to dissipate it. Too few touches of humor occasionally lighten the ambient solemnity, another characteristic of Shyamalan’s cinema. Shyamalan who, it must be recognized, has an undeniable sense of space and composition.
No surprise at the end
The main asset of the film turns out to be Dave Bautista, alias Drax in the saga Guardians of the Galaxy (Guardians of the Galaxy). The actor, who we already knew was gifted for drama since blade runner 2049offers a performance felt in the role of the leader of the illuminated.
The other interpretations, on the other hand, turn out to be very unequal, the fault falling, as we mentioned, more on the direction of the actors than on their talent. This unfortunately applies to Jonathan Groff (Eric) and Ben Aldridge (Andrew), this homoparental couple who, on the eve of Armageddon or not, neither kiss nor hug. Not even a little beak: we shouldn’t scare the world.
The late special effects are also of poor quality: the director has accustomed us to better.
Written by three, the screenplay is inspired by a well-received novel by American author Paul Tremblay. Clearly, something got lost in the adaptation process. Arbitrary rules are laid out from the start, but some will be broken with frustratingly narrative casualness, with internal logic not being the film’s strength. Clumsy flashbacks “open” the camera, which would have benefited from remaining claustrophobic…
The more the film progresses, the more the trinkets come to the fore, to such an extent that Knock at the Cabin would be completely in its place in the current of Christian cinema (Christian movies Where Faith Cinema), a movement that has been very popular for several years in the United States.
He who made his reputation by almost always pulling out of his hat a great final revelation (“ twist ending “), even if it means sinking into involuntary autoparody, M. Night Shyamalan refrains from doing so for once. Finally, if you will, the true nature of the intruders explained during the outcome having been established upstream. However, in this case, a final surprise would not have harmed. Anyway, that door, we won’t open it again.