In Knock at the Cabin, M. Night Shyamalan’s Twist is the Lack of a Twist

In Knock at the Cabin, M. Night Shyamalan’s adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s bestselling novel The Cabin at the End of the World, the narrative crafted by a novelist is overtaken by the more conventional hands of a Hollywood director. The result is a bit complicated to grapple with: some of the issues I had with the novel are remedied in the film version, but in doing so the movie eschews the murkier, more complex finale Tremblay designed.

In terms of storytelling instinct, Shyamalan and Tremblay are different breeds. Tremblay asks questions; Shyamalan answers them. Shyamalan likes plot twists; Tremblay likes complication and escalation. Tremblay’s is an uncertain god worthy of deep skepticism; Shyamalan’s leaves zero ambiguity as to what transpired.

But here’s the thing: I think I like Shyamalan’s version better.

In both versions, the setup is the same: a family on vacation in a cabin in the woods is approached by four strangers wielding strange weapons who claim that unless the family chooses one of its members to die and—even worse—actually does the killing themselves, the world will end in fiery, plague-ridden anguish. The strangers, though initially menacing, turn out to be kind of regular people. Leonard (Dave Bautista), the de facto leader, teaches second grade. Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is a nurse. Adriane’s (Abby Quinn) a line cook with two cats named Riff and Raff. The fourth, Redmond (Rupert Grint), is an ex-con who works for the gas company.

Though they didn’t know each other until very recently, they’ve all had visions of the apocalypse so specific and vivid and relentless that they were compelled to follow what the visions told them, which was that they must go to this cabin in the woods and make this family bear the burden of the entire world.

You can sum this up prettily easily, but neither the novel nor the film provides this information readily. Much to this reader and viewer’s chagrin, the amount of time it takes for the strangers to explain their intentions is infuriatingly long. If I had to convince two fathers and their daughter to pick one person to die in order to save humanity, I would probably start by sharing the visions I was shown in order to prove their validity.

The strangers make a stab at this—by turning on the TV to news channels reporting increasingly apocalyptic events—but they seem to believe that their earnestness, their “everydayness,” and, mostly, how disturbed they are by what they’ve seen, will suffice. Leonard relies on vague, religious-sounding verbiage like “The ocean will swell and rise up into a great fist and pound all the buildings and people into the sand,” and “Then a terrible plague will descend and people will writhe with fear.” Who would be convinced by this?

Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) even ask the strangers to elaborate: “Talk to us,” Eric says to Leonard, “tell us more about what you were shown. Who gave you the nightmares?” But no straightforward answers are forthcoming, which makes the strangers’ behavior even more frustrating, as every time the family refuses to choose, one of the four must die. Redmond is the first to go.

Shivering and terrified, he puts a white mask over his face, and then the other three murder him with their strange instruments. This act, they claim, will stave off the apocalypse for another day, but it will unleash a disaster upon the world. After Redmond’s death, the news channel reports earthquakes in the oceans that cause massive tsunamis in the Pacific Northwest—the ocean “swelling and rising up.”

So far, the novel and film are basically identical—indeed, much of the dialogue is taken verbatim from the book—but here is where the pivotal deviation takes place. Eric and Andrew’s daughter is named Wen (Kristen Cui), a sweet, curious seven-year-old who likes to catch and study grasshoppers. When the strangers reveal their mission, the dramatic tension is between the world and Wen: the strangers want to protect humanity, the macro, while Eric and Andrew want to protect their own little world, the micro. As Andrew says to Leonard, “I would watch the world die a hundred times over before” sacrificing a member of his family.

In the novel, the ambiguity of the strangers’ plans are meant to complicate things for Andrew and Eric: Are these people crazy? Or are their visions a mere pretext for torturing a gay couple? At this point in the book, I assumed that the strangers’ claim would become more and more believable, and the family’s tension would move inward as they fought over the reality of the situation—but instead the entire thing is upended when Wen is accidentally killed by a stray bullet.

I couldn’t believe Tremblay did this, as the momentum of the drama completely stopped for me once Wen died. She was the element that made Eric and Andrew’s choice impossible. With her gone, they’ve lost their micro-universe. I only wanted the fathers to get revenge after that; I no longer cared about the veracity of the apocalypse.

Additionally, this turn of events halts the process the strangers have been operating within. Sabrina bails on the mission, killing Leonard and then herself, but not before telling Eric and Andrew that they can still stop the apocalypse. Eric, who experienced a vision of light during Redmond’s death, remains uncertain, but Andrew says, “Focus on this: they expect us to believe that Wen’s death isn’t a good-enough sacrifice for their god. So you know what? Fuck them and their god. Fuck them all.” The two of them decide not to make a sacrifice to an entity as cruel as that, and they’re left to wander the ever-darkening earth together.

This is a challenging ending to what might have been a conventional horror tale. How many novels feature two defiant gay dads saying “Fuck god” and refusing to submit, the world be damned? It’s a tangled conclusion knotted with moral ambiguity.

But none of that happens in the movie.

Shyamalan and his co-screenwriters, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, take Tremblay’s premise down the road I initially thought it might go. The tense narrative unspools like a taut spring, never veering course. Shyamalan’s version has none of the nuance or originality of the novel, but it’s more dramatically satisfying, and I also think it’s where Tremblay’s premise wanted to go—or, to put it another way, Shyamalan’s ending is the natural conclusion of an idea like this, and by “natural” I guess I mean “conventional.”

Which isn’t the kind of the thing we tend to celebrate about a work of art, but all I know is that as I sat in the theater, waiting to see if Shyamalan would go through with it and kill a cute little girl with a third of his movie still left, there was an undeniable feeling that if he did it—if Wen died—the audience was going to be super pissed about it. Hell, I was going to be super pissed about it.

But Shyamalan’s old-fashioned, Spielbergian sense of filmmaking led him down the road most taken—which is, paradoxically, hardly ever the correct path to take a story down, but in this case, it was the right one. As the sky darkens and lightning blazes the surrounding forest, Eric and Andrew tell Wen to wait in a tree house while they have an emotional debate about what to do next. It’s all so very M. Night. The film of his it most recalls is Signs (2002), in which a three-person family grapples with a worldwide catastrophe only to be saved by a deus ex machina that promotes a generically religious message.

In the end, Shyamalan saves the day by throwing out the plot twist in his movie, and maybe that’s the twist: that there is no twist. Maybe it should have ended with Shyamalan himself (although he already did his usual Hitchcockian cameo) appearing onscreen, dressed in all black with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, a real hero shot, before turning to the camera and saying something coy like “Expecting something?” before laughing maniacally and sashaying off into the horizon as Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” drops on the soundtrack. Roll credits.