Knock At The Cabin (2023)

And, here we go again...

 

 

Another fairly high-tension, potentially high-concept thriller which in the end is content to be merely ludicrous. (Having once landed one of the best endings in recent cinematic history, M. Night Shyalaman has missed a few since.)

For some of the way there is some pleasing dramatic tension between the propositions posed by Faith and Reason, but this is ultimately resolved unsatisfactorily, especially as the kind of Faith we see here is largely of the Qanon variety. Indeed, we find ourselves at the end of a world that has turned out to be one big, rather nasty conspiracy. 

Infinity Pool also asked some hard-edged moral-philosophical questions* and then provided only rather garbled answers. 

Here, Eric's attempt to explain his Damascene conversion to the worldview of his four committed abusers is particularly silly. His husband Andrew has a concurrent loss of faith — in the tenet that humanity are not really worth saving — which at the very least needed the support if its own mysterious figure in the light.

And again, some of the basics could so easily have been done so much better. For example, the way events outside the cabin are represented via TV news reports. 

The ending is less ambiguous than incomplete, by reason of the trail of incongruities left behind it. 

Reason has been trounced, but the judges in this bout may not have been impartial. 

Fine performance from Dave Bautista. 

 * Spoiler: What if you could pay to have a clone suffer the death penalty for you as a surrogate, yet had to watch 'yourself' die?