Review of Knock at the Cabin (2023) by Hnestlyonthesly — 05 Feb 2023

KatC is a livewire act of dumb filmmaking. Someone needs to stop M Night from doing this. He shouldn't be allowed to gaslight us with half-formed movies anymore and every time he does we lose a little bit of our dignity, a little bit of our standards erode.

Look, I am not someone unsympathetic to the art of creepypasta doomsday predictions. There's a game that I've played with Wife before, usually when we're on vacation and I feel like she's getting too comfortable: how many times could you hear the same song out in the wild before you started questioning your reality? We took a walk through the park by the beach once and heard the same song from two or three different passersby, on a boom box, blasting out of a boat, through the earphones of some jogger, prompting us to wonder if we'd encountered the same radio station looping a popular song over the course of the hour. I keep a little news clip on my desktop, one that I at this very moment am wary of sharing because of 1) how it will make me look maybe a little bit unwell and 2) how unwell I'll feel if suddenly my corroborating evidence suddenly vanishes: a screenshot of an article that's clearly a typo about deforestation, but which looks like something that was accidentally posted from the future into the present, a kind of glitch in the Matrix that tests your ability not to be weirded out. The article is still up there, still hasn't been fixed after more than a year as of this writing, which somehow makes it weirder.

Which is to say, I'm game for some weird end of days stuff. Sign me up, hey I'll even bring my anxieties about time travel along for the ride if you let me. This movie was not an invitation into the uncanny. The deep exhale you take because the film begins exactly where one would hope, no preamble, just cold hard home invasion from the trailer, doesn't actually accelerate the plot into something new and unexpected. Part of the immense disappointment, the deep shame, palpable within everyone who looked around for confirmation of their poor decisions at the cut to black, is that there, as far as I can tell, is no depth to this story at all. It is entirely concept: what if doomsdayers happened to be right one particular time? Could they convince a normie that it was real? The real monkey wrench that you're waiting for, the hiccup that's going to send you reeling? Minor. Barely an inconvenience. Our access to verification that the End Times are nigh is freely available on cable television. The set of compounding coincidences seem fairly compelling by the third "plague" released by the Horsemen. Rather than leave some strategic ambiguity, as the term is used in foreign policy, M Night and his goons resort to some heavy-handed realism. There is some dispute among Friends on this, one maintains that the "twist" is that it's all real, but I think anyone who's been subjected to the trailer is already prepared for some of even the most final scenes of the movie. The twist I detect, if it can be called that, is that the victims have already encountered some of the Horsemen previously, which is, hey, not a terrible complication, but also seems a little bit sidelined by the fact that so many bad things are happening in such quick succession. Wife, during our quick debrief at the end of the night, asked if it felt at all like Ready or Not ("I maintain that was a good movie," she reiterated just now), where the end's twist really does put into question and complicate some of the comedy of earlier in the movie. "It was just 'everything's real, deal with it'," I said, deflated. "Was any of it redeemable?" I asked, distraught, as Friends scattered to the winds in the parking lot, and what I think I meant was, would it have been better if all the bad things had been a little... smaller? I suppose? If a nascent pandemic had come on the heels of a few aircraft failures during an especially bad day of war? If, in other words, it had been February 2020? But that's White Noise, that's Don't Look Up.

The slow disaster that we can't see coming because it's creeping up on us so slowly or we're so blinkered, so consumed in our own drama, we don't even notice. Maybe that would've been a trite commentary, but instead, we got a crisis of faith plot on training wheels, which, as one Friend put it, at no point ever trusted the audience to understand nuance.

I'm frustrated at myself for thinking this could be more than the sum of its parts. I'm frustrated that I thought an end credits scene could redeem the first ninety minutes of it. I'm frustrated but you don't need to be. I had a Friend who I invited who never showed up and he dodged a bullet, which is more than I can say for any of the characters in this movie.