“I’ve been looking forward to this movie for months. It wasn’t worth the wait.” Mark Jabara
Based on Paul G. Tremblay’s 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World, M. Night Shyamalan movie version Knock at the Cabin doesn’t deliver as it should partly because of Knights directing and changes that he made to the original novel. Although some of the movie’s changes were inevitable and the book is hardly some sacrosanct masterwork, the disruption of the story’s final act makes the movie feel incoherent at best.
The premise is good: Husbands Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff) vacationing at a lakeside cabin in the woods with their adopted daughter, Wen (Kristen Cui), when four strangers — a large, spectacled elementary school teacher named Leonard (Dave Bautista), a seemingly kind-hearted cook named Ardiane (Abby Quinn), a conflicted nurse named Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and a rough-and-tumble man named Redmond (Rupert Grint) — invade their lodging. The men are tied up and presented with a cruel task: choose a member of their family to sacrifice. The strangers promise they won’t make the decision for them, but they will not allow any of them to leave the premises until a decision has been made. If the family does not pick a sacrifice, the kidnappers are convinced the world will come to an end.
The movie spends a good 10 minutes explaining that one family is chosen every so often to decide the fate of all of humanity and strongly making the point that their family wasn’t chosen because Wen has two daddies and that Andrew and Eric were chosen because of the immense love they share for each other and their daughter.
Yet it plays out like it’s supposed to be believable. The gay couple are a walking cliche, complete with homophobic parents, one of them pretending to have a wife so they can adopt, a gay bashing in a bar Plus a lack of connection, attraction and physical affection between Andrew ( Aldridge) and Eric ( Groff) also takes away from the film.
It’s amazing openly gay actors would agree to be in such dross. 7 billion people are going to die horribly, unless a gay guy kills his husband. That is the entire premise of this of the film.
#KillYourGays and all that.
Disclaimer: Knock at the Cabin was not made available for review to many LGBT critics by Universal. Now perhaps we know why.
