M. Night Shyamalan is the director who knocks.
Actually, it’s a scary Dave Bautista who’s at the door in the first trailer for Shymalan’s new thriller, Knock At The Cabin.
Filled by Night’s patented, patient atmospherics, Knock At The Cabin is Shymalan’s latest high concept, modestly-budgeted nail-biter. Bautista co-stars as the leader of some fringe cult that believes they’ve been called to stop the apocalypse, and the key to their battle lies in a sacrifice that must be made by a small family on vacation deep in the woods.
The official synopsis sums up what the trailer reveals rather well:
- “While vacationing at a remote cabin, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that the family make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. With limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.“
What makes this particularly intriguing is that, based on Night’s track record, these strangers most likely won’t be your typical, baseless conspiracy theorists or psycho cultists; they will likely be working from some valid basis, with some veracity to their mission — which should make the actual stakes and choices that these characters face much more compelling and complex than your average home invasion thrill machine. Let’s certainly hope so.
Suffice it to say, like his movie Signs, Shyamalan appears to be taking a premise with global implications and explore it through a very remote, specific, intimate context. That dichotomy is what helps intensive mystery and suspense.
Starring Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge as the parents of newcomer Kristen Cui, along with Bautista’s followers played by Rupert Grint, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Abby Quinn, Knock At The Cabin — based on the bestselling 2018 novel “The Cabin at the End of the World” by Paul G. Tremblay — opens early next year on February 3, 2023.
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