*/****
starring Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Rupert Grint, Ben Aldridge
screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan and Steve Desmond & Michael Sherman, based on the book The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay
directed by M. Night Shyamalan
by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT FOR BOTH THE FILM AND THE BOOK ON WHICH IT’S BASED. M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin is an accurate and appropriately vile portrait of Evangelical Christianity and a conservative mindset based on a sense of righteous indignation that their ignorance and bile are not well-received by people whom they despise for receiving the gifts they themselves have not received. The maxim of the meek inheriting the Earth is not, after all, a promise of something good, but rather the herald of small, terrified people emboldened by their shared ignorance and repulsive mythologies to exterminate everything that is not as morally bankrupt and spiritually unmoored as them. They imagine they’re the good guys, the ones magnanimous in their mercy and forgiveness, when in fact they are the reason mercy and forgiveness are necessary in the world. If it were not so, the Sermon on the Mount–the keynote address by their ostensible human godhead–would be the document they’re pushing to be posted in every classroom instead of the Ten Commandments and the Pledge of Allegiance to precisely the type of golden calf their fairytales warn against. The world is ending, not because of gay marriage, abortion, or immigration, but because of the prosperity gospel. In many ways, Knock at the Cabin shares an ideological space with Scorsese’s Silence, yet only one of them reckons with the Christian god’s promised, and thorny, non-intervention in the affairs of its creation. Only one of them, in other words, isn’t a piece of ecstatic, ecclesiastical hoohah.
The film opens with Wen (Kristen Cui) catching grasshoppers and anthropomorphizing them as she deposits them into a jar. She names one after a classmate who farts in class and chides the bug, “You’re sharing this jar now and the others won’t like what you smell.” This is Shyamalan’s first self-serving bit of self-effacing humour, the sort you’ll recognize when you open your door out of kindness to proselytizers cast by their church into the role of unwelcome intruder on a stranger’s step, the better to cement their detachment from their community in exchange for a deeper attachment to their brothers and sisters in unjust social exile. He’s about to lay some difficult truths on us and we’re not going to like it, but that doesn’t make them untrue. I think I’m following along okay. Joining Wen in her entomological pursuits, hulking Leonard (Dave Bautista) appears out of the forest like a Grimm wolf wearing grandmother’s spider-wire glasses. He tells her he’s in anguish for the things he’s about to do, and so this aggressive interloper has been cast in the servile role of penitent victim. Christianity is a servility cult that worships not a martyr, but martyrdom. If you’re not aggrieved, you’re doing it wrong. Wen is on vacation with her dads, aggro Andrew (Ben Aldrige) and over-thinker Eric (Jonathan Groff), at a remote cabin at the end of the world, and Leonard is soon joined by the other three horsemen of the apocalypse: Redmond (Rupert Grint), Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and Abby (Abby Quinn). Do you remember when the yellow Power Ranger was the Asian one and the black one was the Black one? I don’t know why I thought of that.
Leonard’s Good News is that Wen, Andrew, and Eric must choose one of their number to die. They can’t kill themselves, nor, if you’ve read Paul Tremblay’s superior-in-every-way source novel The Cabin at the End of the World, be killed accidentally. Should they not choose by deadlines dictated by Leonard, Leonard and his buddies will kill one of their number in order to unleash the herald of the apocalypse they each represent in the hardcore kooky Book of Revelations. A book, by the way, that makes no mention of a Rapture in which true believers, living or dead, will ascend to Christian Heaven to spend an eternity looking at God. That’s something that came about later, perhaps to justify a life of endless, unrelieved atrocity and suffering. Sure, life here is the pits, but follow me, kid, and the next one’ll be incredible. Tremblay’s book deals with eschatological questions like this in beautiful, dark, mysterious ways. Check out this exchange:
“I don’t care about your last name! I want your answer. Tell me. What kind of god is making all this happen?”
“The one we have.”
That’s frankly amazing. One of the rare times I’ve ever heard an acceptable answer to why there’s unspeakable pain and injustice in the world–the answer to the riddle of the story of Job, which paints the Christian deity as a small, sadistic child. If there’s a Christian god, it’s young Anthony Fremont in the “It’s a Good Life” episode of “The Twilight Zone”. Yes, there’s a Plan. The Plan is to extort praise whether it’s warranted or not–in fact, when evidence of the opposite is in considerably greater supply than evidence of grace.
Knock at the Cabin trafficks in the idea that whenever a terrible thing happens, it’s somebody’s fault. Someone didn’t do enough. Someone wasn’t clear enough in the Truth in time, so now a lot of people are dead. This is the kind of magical thinking that blames a pandemic on an entire race–that allows the stupidest and most selfish Morlocks who ever trod this green-for-now earth to think they know a secret that can only be learned by not working very hard, not reading very much, and not thinking very well, but believing in angels more than anyone else. This is the kind of magical thinking that gets a lot of people killed while shielding the actual oppressors from guilt over their complicity. Cater to the yawning madness of their holy roll and even the Presidency can be yours. In the book, there is a fraught, ambiguous scene where Eric celebrates that Andrew’s parents bothered to show up in person for their engagement announcement. In the film, ambiguity is anathema, thus we get some Birdcage glowering, a “they drove seven hours to stay forty-five minutes,” and an opportunity to shake our heads sadly in solidarity with the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner of it all. If you brought Sidney Poitier home to dinner, even in the 1960s, the parents would be doing somersaults and hand-inking wedding invitations. Then a flash to Eric and Andrew’s adoption of poor maybe-orphan Wen, afflicted with a cleft palate, the repair of which is mentioned later as a way to lead into Leonard’s expression of personal pain. Yes, he takes the scar on the lip of a little girl as an invitation to say that his heart is broken because his mad god has burdened him to commit murders and deliver Phillipa Foot’s Trolley Problem to people minding their own business. It’s not unrealistic behaviour, Leonard’s solipsism: it’s far too realistic. People are drawn to certain ideologies precisely because of their lack of willingness or ability to have empathy for other people. There is not a “god problem” for most Christians, because they can’t believe other people suffer. These flashbacks are meant to cement Eric and Andrew and Wen’s devotion to one another so that their sacrifice for the world, should they choose to make it, is meaningful. Shyamalan is attempting to provide an empathy shunt to a necrotic organ. His greatest twist, after all, is the complete inability to not explain everything to the extent he understands it. There is no room for mystery. A puzzle is not a riddle, and Shyamalan’s Trolley Test has just one solution.
For the world to survive, Shyamalan says, those most oppressed and abused by religious fanaticism and its handmaiden political terrorism must sacrifice themselves. It’s up to the downtrodden–the victims–to reaffirm their moral and intellectual, philosophical or otherwise, superiority and step aside for the absolute worst of us to survive. There’s absolute truth in this, though Shyamalan poses it as a tale of uplift rather than the horrorshow it is. It’s like going to church, but with subtle shift phases in the lens so the sense of menace is magnified; with the grasshoppers in a jar subbing for a spider hung above an abyss in Jonathan Edwards’s sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God; with some committed performances from a cast that must be held blameless in their execution of this half-assed Passion Play. In the book, Wen remembers she’s left her grasshoppers out in the sun to die, and this causes her to tantrum. In the film, Wen tantrums to provide cover for Andrew’s escape. She survives in the film, too, which she does not in the book, murdered there accidentally when Leonard squeezes Andrew’s hand while Andrew’s holding a gun. It’s like if Abraham accidentally kills Isaac when his knife slips during a tussle with a giant stranger serving as God’s emissary–and then the sacrifice isn’t enough, because Abraham didn’t follow the rules of the fun game that is funny that this Dr. Seuss of a deity has conjured up for laffs. Wen’s empathy for the grasshoppers helpless in her care is set against the Christian god’s lack of same, you see. Wen has set the rules for their existence, then she changed them, and this causes her to despair. In the film, a glimpse of the future sees adult Wen as exceptional, which is enough for Eric to decide he should be murdered for the sake of mankind. Forgive them, Andrew, they know not what they do.
Tremblay writes, “No matter how bleak or dire, end-of-the-world scenarios appeal to us because we take meaning from the end.” It’s a revelation so clear and beautifully articulated that it took my breath away. It’s a line and an insight destined to inform my future thoughts about all these entertainments set when the world finally gives up the illusion. Taking it now as a cue to looking at Knock at the Cabin, I see a story that presents hope in the form of embracing cultists who substitute science for faith, evidence for faith, reason for faith. There are not two sides to every debate. It could play as a quantum thing, a warning that if there are ever enough Rapture freaks, then sure enough, the Rapture will appear. But if that’s the case, how does the willing bending of a knee to violent conspiracy theorists building their cathedrals in chatrooms slow the end? By somehow bestowing empathy on an entire population incapable of drawing the straight line between wearing a mask and not wilfully endangering the ill, the elderly, the otherwise vulnerable? And what is the wisdom, exactly, of confirming one pervasive belief of the suicidally depressed that their death serves a grand, curative purpose? That’s some dangerous shit right there. How does it move the ball by assuring the reptiles in man-clothes that their relentless discrimination against the powerless might inspire the powerless to extinguish themselves for the greater good? This isn’t about grace, it’s about capitulation. The book says that if this is the world to be saved, go fuck yourself. The film says, eh, don’t get hysterical. Do this thing, and we’ll find a place where you can exist, a little isolated pocket like a camp, for instance. Or a reservation. Shyamalan makes a cameo in Knock at the Cabin as an infomercial huckster, peddling a cheap product on the back of performative authority and unctuous charisma. It’s not humility if it’s true.
