Gay dads face the apocalypse in ‘Knock at the Cabin’
As horrors go, it’s hard to get more horrible than the end of the world. It’s the ultimate existential threat, a potent fear that has fueled nightmares for millennia, but while it may feel chillingly plausible in our modern era, many of us tend to imagine it in terms of scientific reality – climate change, collision with an asteroid, or simply the eventual death of the sun – rather than as a literal enactment of the doomsday scenarios proscribed in the myths, folktales, and religions of the ancient world.
What if we’re wrong, though? That’s the essential hook in “Knock at the Cabin,” the latest thriller from horror movie maestro M.
Night Shyamalan, which gambles that its viewers – even those who staunchly believe in a science-and-reason-based conception of the universe – might still occasionally be kept awake at night by a flicker of doubt, and spends a slow-burning 100 minutes trying to stoke that flicker into an apocalyptic flame.
Based on Paul Tremblay’s Stoker Award-winning 2018 novel “The Cabin at the End of the World,” Shyamalan’s compact adaptation (co-written with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman) doesn’t waste much time setting up its confrontation between rational secularism and End Times prophecy; gay dads Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), vacationing in the woods with their daughter Wen (Kristen Cui), have barely settled into their rented cabin when a quartet of ominous strangers – led by hulking-but-soft-spoken Leonard (Dave Bautista) – shows up at the door, insisting to be let in and not willing to take “no” as an answer.
