Review: Knock At The Cabin

It's nice that we're long past the wilderness phase of director M. Night Shyamalan's career.

Since releasing 'The Visit' in 2015, Shyamalan has been on a pretty solid run of releases and it's great to see that the anticipation for his new releases is consistently pretty healthy.

The concept for this latest instalment has another peculiar concept that belongs in something like The Twilight Zone. Like with a lot Shyamalan's previous work, the way it is introduced is nice and simple to follow and is played around well enough to make it a tense experience.

However, I was honestly disappointed that it wasn't the complete Shyamalan experience that we're used to having. But there was still plenty of aspects to know that you were watching one of his films and it gave us some solidly executed sequences as well as a number of strong performances.

Dave Bautista was a surprising highlight. While it has been clear for the last few years that he is improving as an actor. This latest performance shows that becoming more than just good. The choices of projects that he is choosing are very wise and well utilised. With Bautista having the majority of the screen-time and dialogue, his presence and performance showed me that we are witnessing an accomplished actor that is truly challenging themselves.

Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff were good together and bounced off Bautista and his characters crew well to heighten the situation and tension. Youngster Kristen Cui was great in it. This young talent showed great presence and maturity and could easily cope with the adult actors around. I hope this is the first many of projects.

Rupert Grint was a nice surprise to see in another big screen project and his performance gave us a great reminder how good of an actor he still is. The same goes for Nikki Amuka-Bird who I know more for her TV work.

I liked how they made the most of the small cast and locations. That's especially thanks to the camerawork which was very effective and nicely varied. Even from the opening scene, you get some striking choices in the angles that already give the viewer an unsettling vibe.

It covers topics such as the influence of the media and religion and identity. However the ending did feel like those ideas were never fully fledged and only touched upon. 

It did leave me expecting more given it was Shyamalan at the helm. It concluded in a pretty conventional way. Thankfully, it didn't downgrade my overall view of the film. But you just always have that natural expectation of an abrupt or cleverly constructed twist. It just ended up being very literal by concluding with one of the two ways we were set-up with at the beginning.

I think it may have been more effective if it didn't show as much as it did outside of the characters location. I think bringing that fear of not knowing what is happening around them could have made what we saw in the end more effective.

While I did enjoy it on the whole, there were clearly parts that could have easily been better developed or executed.

But I would still recommend this. The concept works well enough, there are a number of good performances, it's shot really well and the tension mounts up nicely.

This is another solid entry by Shyamalan. He may be lacking that initial impact he had on the industry with The Sixth Sense and Signs. But he's still on the right track for potentially giving us another instant classic.

Rating: 7/10