Another M. Night Shyamalan film is almost upon us! What a twist! Since his breakthrough The Sixth Sense, the filmmaker has given us a steady supply of meticulously-constructed thrillers over the course of his career—Unbreakable, Signs, Split, The Visit, and more. Sure, there’s been some… dips in quality, but the man knows his stuff. But, we hear you ask, what is Knock at the Cabin actually about?
Well, we could go to the source novel. Knock at the Cabin is based on the (excellent, by the way) book The Cabin at the End of the World by top notch horror writer Paul Tremblay. But that might not give us enough to go on—Shyamalan has admitted he changed the original bleak ending for…well, something else. Here’s what we do know.
Married couple Andrew and Eric (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge), plus their adopted seven-year-old daughter Wen (Kristen Cui), are spending some time in their titular home away from home when four strangers break in: Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane (Abby Quinn), Redmond (Rupert Grint), and their leader Leonard (Dave Bautista).
The four seem to be members of an apocalyptic cult, and they insist that the world is about to end. Only by sacrificing one of the family can the apocalypse be averted, so they say—and they want Andrew, Eric, and Wen to choose who dies. It’s a horrifying home invasion scenario, but as we can see from the trailer, news broadcasts of large-scale disasters indicate the creepy quartet may be onto something. So the question is: would you sacrifice a family member, or even yourself, to stave off Armageddon?
In typical Shyamalan style, those are all the details we have to go on for now, but given the director has already tinkered with the finale, it’s a safe bet that this is yet another of his movies with a twist in the tail.
