In the most heart-sinking possible way, M Night Shyamalan has done it again. As so often in the past, he teases us with a great come-on, a great ultra-high-concept initial premise, a great opening scene. And then …? Well, it isn’t long before the film is revealed to be (and, really, only this technical term of criticism will do) complete bollocks.
It is a supposed apocalyptic nightmare (adapted from the 2018 horror bestseller The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay) which turns out to be a silly shaggy dog story whose big reveal is bizarrely anti-climactic, unscary and unimpressive: it is at once madly overblown and entirely negligible, exasperatingly deficient in ingenuity or genuine thrills with characters whose motivation is sketchy even on the drama’s own terms.
