“Knock at the Cabin” is a real load — 100 lugubrious minutes of what is intended as steadily mounting dread and apocalypse prevention seminar.
It’s frustrating because writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has made seriously good films and some that go splat. With every new Shyamalan project, millions of moviegoers have a way of holding out hope based on his best efforts, and the luck of the draw.
This one comes from the 2018 Paul Tremblay novel “The Cabin at the End of the World,” and there are moments when the adaptation by Shyamalan, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman — the filmmaker wrote his version based on Desmond and Sherman’s script — feels as if it might be getting somewhere, albeit slowly. The acting’s quite good. But there is more to filmmaking and storytelling than what the actors can do.
