M. Night Shyamalan started making movies in the wrong era. Following the critical and commercial successes of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, the earnestness of his work from 2002-2008 played at odds with the rising tide of hero-worship and militarism in popular American cinema post 9/11. The solutions in Shyamalan’s films cannot be brute forced with violence, but discovered; everything is masked in smoke and mirrors, and power dynamics emerge from a lack of information: the arrival of aliens in Signs, the secrets kept by the elders in The Village, the blind faith required in Lady in the Water, the reasons for the collapse of society in The Happening. The so-called “twist” endings for which Shyamalan became known are not so much tricks as revelations. The fog lifts, and withheld information is able to be processed and understood, if not always by the characters then by the viewer, in such a way as to show a path to some kind of future by recontextualising everything that came before. Education is everything.
Following a strange decade in the 2010s, from The Last Airbender to Glass, Shyamalan returned to high-concept original drama with 2021’s Old, in which several holidaymakers find themselves trapped on a secluded beach that inexplicably accelerates the ageing process. Old similarly relies on an absence of information to drive its narrative, but unlike these previous works, the final pull-back of the curtain doesn’t reveal the machinations of this beach, but rather the exploitation of these machinations by higher forces. There’s nothing here that can be overcome or understood. For this new era for Shyamalan, comprehension isn’t always enough.
And that brings us to Knock at the Cabin, a film about the limits of comprehension, in which a young family is tied up in a holiday cabin by four armed strangers and told they must sacrifice one of their own to stop the apocalypse. The key absence here is proof that any of this is really happening. The strangers believe that it is but the family have no reason to believe them, and the dramatic thrust of the film is the tension between these two viewpoints as new information is brought to light. A well-timed breaking news report is both proof of the end of the world and a convenient coincidence, and the revelation that these strangers found each other on an online message board is both divine intervention and evidence of a shared delusion. Information can be disputed to serve any purpose, and everyone remains at an impasse as long as doubt exists. If information is not enough, it’s a matter of finding another way to connect. An act of faith, of trust, of love; even a sacrifice. For Shyamalan, there has to be some way to move forward, whatever the cost.
And yet, with Old, and now with Knock at the Cabin, there’s a growing sense in Shyamalan's work of what these characters have lost, or what they have to give up, in order to get to such a point. Both of these films end with a broken family moving towards an uncertain future, and while it's true that a sliver of hope does endure, that there is a future to move into, it’s one poisoned by lost time.