There’s something scary trying to get inside in M Night Shyamalan’s new chiller Knock at the Cabin, which opened at number one over the weekend. On the surface, it’s a home invasion narrative about a mysterious foursome with grisly-looking weapons trying to break their way into a remote cabin, inhabited by a visiting family. On closer look, it’s actually about violent visions of a biblical apocalypse trying to pierce through vulnerable minds with outsiders claiming the end is near unless the invaded make a terrible sacrifice. But with the three characters in jeopardy a gay couple and their adopted daughter, the film morphs again into something else, the horrors of reality forcing their way into the fragile idyll of progressivism.
It’s a strange, at times strangely not very good, movie (the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it all “deeply ridiculous”), but one that’s strangely fascinating for reasons it might not always be cognisant of, existing in a political space that feels mildly inadvertent and majorly confusing.
