‘Knock at the door’ (Knock at the Cabin, 2023) is the long-awaited new film by M. Night Shyamalan, the idolized genius of fantastic cinema, who, after a dark stage full of junk and petulant projects, has been resurrected using a compressed film strategy in concept capsules, with little budget and good workmanaging to convince again with works like ‘Multiple’ or ‘Glass’, under the tutelage of Blumhouse.
The director managed to recover and for his new projects he achieved independence from Blum, and this is already the second in a three-thriller partnership for Universal Pictures through Blinding Edge Pictures. The first was ‘Time’, released in 2021, and now it is the adaptation of a 2018 novel written by horror author Paul G. Tremblay called ‘The Cabin at the End of the World’, which earned the writer his second Bram Stoker Award, being the first of his stories to come to the screen, although the director distances himself a bit from the source material.
Shyamalan has a tendency to be a one-man band, writing, producing and directing his own films and ‘A Knock on the Door’ has been no different, adapting the script from the source material to make it less stifling and slightly more upbeat, with modifications that better suit your work. Here the plot follows the couple formed by Andrew and Eric, and their young adopted daughter inside a cabin in the woods, who is approached by a man who introduces himself as Leonard to the daughter, while she is collecting bugs. alone.
The cabin at the end of the world
The man reveals to the girl that he is heartbroken over something he and his friends have to do, at which point three other people emerge from the woods and, after talking to Andrew and Eric through the closed doors of the cabin, the four of them strangers break into the house saying they have a “very important job to do”, which could be the most important “in the history of the world”, forcing them to make a decision and, if they don’t, there will be consequences that go beyond the destination of those present.
‘Knock on the door’ is the type of film that the less is known about it the better, since His greatest asset is the way in which he unfolds his mystery and develops his revelations.. The trait to note for Shyamalan movie lovers is that he continues his tendency to incorporate religion into some of his stories, playing here, as in ‘Signs’, where the main character is a Catholic priest who struggles with his beliefs after the death of his wife, with the idea of what may or may not be possible, the debate of faith in a different period of time.
We also have an isolated family in a rural area and some external elements that attack it, proposing itself as a home invasion that to a certain extent resembles ‘Us’, with which it has more in common due to its inspiration in ‘The Twilight Zone’ than for its fantastic element. As in ‘Time’, here the director of ‘The incident’ proposes what could be an episode of the Rod Serling serieswith mysterious characters who invite others to make critical decisions that involve ethical aspects derived from the trolley dilemma.
A soft thriller but well posed
The problem is that at 110 minutes long, the story calls for a little more complexity, a more detailed script, or a more exciting exploration of the mythology it raises, and yet, his disposition to minimalism generates a clear calligraphy but devoid of surprisehe takes more time than necessary to go in and out of phases that we already know, more than for an efficient classicism for an eagerness to sustain a very artificial and artificial tension, lacking any other punch than curiosity.
This puts the tempo on the edge of apathy, even though it always manages to move forward, even though once we know the rules, the surprise factor is minimal and a bit predictable, in a time when we’ve seen a lot of number of similar works. Furthermore, a certain very small Spanish film, two years prior to Tremblay’s book, saves some too suspicious starting point resemblances, only that that one was much darker, tragicomic, daring and brave. All in all, it’s impossible not to admire Shyamalan’s courage to shoot small works with a big eye.
Its staging is impeccable, it shows great control of every detail, good actors and a great, great photograph of Jarin Blaschke and Lowell A. Meyer. ‘Knock on the door’ is camouflaged post-pandemic cinema, with a naive message but deep down warm and well-intentioned, whose biggest sin is not wanting to go a little further and show how a director, too convinced in the benefits of the gears of commercial cinema, it dons the concept-thriller mask without leaving its safe places, even within an R-rating that seems to want to stick with the contour of 12-year-old kids’ cinema.