For his fifteenth feature film, M. Night Shyamalan is once again back in horror cinema with Knock at the Cabin. An oppressive film behind closed doors that summons Dave Bautista, Ben Aldridge, Jonathan Groff, Rupert Grint and Nikki Amuka-Bird. The story tells how four unidentified individuals take hostage a family who spends their holidays in a cottage in the middle of a little-frequented forest. Little Wen and her two dads will have to face the psychotic delirium of strangers who think that the end of the world is imminent, and that only the sacrifice of one of the three members of the family can avoid the apocalypse.
Knock at the Cabin : Back to basics
With his new proposal, M. Night Shyamalan once again addresses his usual obsessions. As often in his career, the director offers a work that develops the superstitions and psychoses of his characters. As in many of his feature films, the filmmaker feeds on the beliefs of his protagonists in mysterious, religious or Homeric forces. Beliefs that force these characters to live entrenched, or to materialize them by a form of marginal radicalism. This is for example the case in The Sixth Sense, where young Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) is persuaded to see ghosts, which forces him to consult a psychologist. This is the case in the Unbreakable trilogy, where David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is convinced to have powers, because of a simple coincidence: he is the only survivor of a train accident. A certainty questioned in Glass. This is the case in Signs, where everything suggests that aliens are present. And this is obviously the case in The Village, where a whole community lives in seclusion because of the presence of so-called monsters around. This totally cuts them off from reality. Knock at the Cabin is no exception to the rule, as usual, the search for the true and the false is absorbing for the public. 
In fact, M. Night Shyamalan's cinema is punctuated by this eternal opposition between believers and skeptics. Two ways of seeing things that constantly clash in the face of more or less convincing signs. The former will say that these are realistic manifestations and some of their beliefs while the others will claim that they are mere coincidences that add grist to their mill. Knock at the Cabin perfectly captures this narrative scheme. The director pits skeptics and believers against each other through an oppressive and exciting verbal joust lasting just over an hour and a half. Everyone presents their arguments, and the viewer finds himself in the middle, without really knowing who to believe. And it's very stimulating.
Universal themes
With Knock at the Cabin, M. Night Shyamalan tackles universal concepts. He brings religion and the end of the world to the center of his plot. To summarize simply, with Knock at the Cabin, he materializes the concept of the Doomsday clock. It recalls the urgency of the current ecological situation, and the immediacy of the end of the world that continues to approach. He bases himself on this reality to make it drift towards a more religious approach. The invaders led by Leonard (Dave Bautista) are convinced that a human sacrifice will prevent the apocalypse, and calm an almost divine fury. Even though God is never mentioned in the film. 
Then, little by little, the members of the couple played by Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff themselves become ideological representations of the audience. The former is uncompromising and refuses to believe Leonard's group's warnings, arguing that their visions are mere paranoid coincidences, while the latter, a believer, is more inclined to be seduced by the symbols of his attackers. An opposition that will find its quintessence in the conclusion of the film, where their feelings will turn into a confrontation of hope and pessimism, good and evil, brotherhood and selfishness. An end also a little tendentious, in which M. Night Shyamalan offers a mystical crescendo of great force. Somewhere between the scientific apocalypse and the supernatural, the end of the world is accelerating and our heroes must make a decision: should we sacrifice ourselves yes or no?
Spoilers part
THE REST OF THE ARTICLE WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS. With the sacrifice of Jonathan Groff's character, M. Night Shyamalan seems to prove Leonard's group right. He seems to side with the religious leanings of his work. As if, the only way to prevent the end of the world was to believe in God. A somewhat disturbing theological and puritanical conclusion, where sacrifice is the only way to calm God's wrath, and thus save the Earth. If this is undoubtedly a broader message, which explains that to save our planet from global warming, each of us will undoubtedly have to make sacrifices, the religious dimension nevertheless poses ethical problems on the way of representing religion and is, unfortunately, sometimes quite nauseating… https://youtu.be/Vk5SKDqHLcU Knock at the Cabin is a bit like Old, M. Night Shyamalan offers a great concept, but a sometimes wobbly execution. We remain deeply divided on the conclusion of the film, on the message of the filmmaker, through an ambiguous puritanical and religious morality…
