Knock at the Cabin Review: the new horror film by Night Shyamalan
M. Night Shyamalan returns, after the beautiful Old of 2021, with Knock at the Cabin, a film representing his way of conceiving cinema.
If he had already shown himself in splendid shape with Old, a theoretical thriller about staging and the role of the actor in front of the camera, with Knock at the Cabin M. Night Shyamalan releases his manifesto on his way of conceiving cinema, of thinking about it, of seeing it.
As often happens to him – it happened, for example, in Split, in the initial shot/reverse shot in which the characters of Anya Taylor-Joy and James McAvoy were ‘mirroring’ each other, which immediately created a connection between them without the need for dialogue but through images – M. Night Shyamalan already tells us everything with the opening sequence, which through a high-angle and counter-high-angle shots that ‘talk’ to each other underscores for us a distance – perhaps unresolvable or perhaps not – between two bodies that could not be more different (the huge Dave Bautista and the tiny child protagonist) brings into play.
In the world perhaps no one uses the camera to highlight that movement or concept the way Shyamalan does, who rather than a sophisticated screenwriter often remembered for his deadly plot twists should be incensed from time to time for his ability to build his films through images, what they say to us, and especially what they say to each other.
“You have to look!”
And so, passing through genre forms (always in the first few minutes, the shots become skewed as if something for the characters-and for us-begins to crack), Knock at the Cabin stages the impossible: the belief, which by definition is the unseen, what cannot be looked at, what is not there.
It is funny that in the film for once, the truth comes from television (the same whose boundaries and formats Shyamalan is bending with Servant, one of the best TV series to watch on Apple TV+ : the director himself will appear on TV, in this film, with a hilarious cameo!), and at one point even Bautista will start ‘dubbing’ a person inside the screen, while Shyamalan films both frontally (Bautista and the TV behind him, and then the person inside the TV) creating a mise en abyme about the two primary audiovisual means of seeing and believing: because seeing is believing, and watching (“You have to watch!” will be shouted at one point) is the means of getting to believing.
What is the film about? There is the trailer above if you want to get a feel for it, but really the plot in a movie is not the most important thing, and this is a sacred dogma in Shyamalan’s cinema: this is an applied film suspense theory lesson, and the master has risen to the chair buoyed by enthusiasm.
What a show, ladies and gentlemen.
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