Review: 'Knock at the Cabin' is a solid thriller from M. Night Shyamalan, but Dave Bautista is the reason to watch

As he has done so often in his career, director M. Night Shyamalan deploys his abundant skills as a film craftsman to uncertain ends in “Knock at the Cabin” — a tough-minded horror thriller that keeps the audience clenched in anticipation all the way to a finale that will have as many interpretations as it has viewers.

(I’ll try to keep the synopsis out of spoiler territory — other than what Universal has already divulged in the movie’s trailer. But If you want to go in cold, read this after you’ve seen it and we can compare experiences.)

The story begins with Wen (Kristen Cui), almost 8 years old, out in the woods catching grasshoppers in a jar and diligently cataloging them in her notebook. Then she notices a man some distance away in the woods — and, before long, the man is walking right up to talk to her.

The man, played by Dave Bautista, is large and, at first, intimidating. He talks in a quiet, reassuring voice. Wen is wary, telling the man that she’s not supposed to talk to strangers — and the man agrees that is a wise policy. He tells Wen that “I’m here to be your friend,” and introduces himself as Leonard. Then he says his heart is broken, “because of what I have to do today.”

This scares Wen, as it should, and she runs back to the rental cabin she’s sharing with her two dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge). They lock the doors and windows, and wait until Leonard pounds on the front door.

Leonard’s not alone. He has three people with them, all carrying makeshift weapons — clubs with large blades attached, mostly. They fight their way into the house, and in the short battle Eric is knocked out and given a concussion. Both dads are tied to chairs, which is when Leonard and the others explain themselves.

Leonard insists that he and the others are ordinary folks — Leonard’s a schoolteacher from Chicago; Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird) identifies herself as a post-op nurse from California; Adriana (Abby Quinn) says she works as a line cook in a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C.; and Redmond (Rupert Grint) works for a utility in Boston. 

The four say they all have seen visions of the apocalypse, and are convinced that the only way to prevent the end of the world is for Eric, Andrew and Wen to choose for one of them to be sacrificed, killed by someone in their family. The longer they wait to make that choice, Leonard tells them, more people on Earth will die.

The script — written by Shyamalan and the rookie writing team of Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, adapting Paul Tremblay’s novel “The Cabin at the End of the World” — moves to a fairly familiar rhythm, as the four invaders plead with the two dads, who don’t believe their talk of apocalypse. There also are some well-placed flashbacks that establish the dads’ relationship and how they adopted Wen as a baby from China to become this loving family.

The remarkable moments in the film belong to Bautista, who’s become more of a true actor than one would expect from a 6-foot-4 ex-wrestler. Bautista has previously shown he’s got action and comic chops, in his role as Drax in Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies. Here, though, he brings a soulfulness and a quiet intensity to the pre-apocalyptic proceedings.

The question mark, as with most Shyamalan movies, is how he sticks the landing. In his masterpieces, “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable,” the ending is where all the pieces fall perfectly into place, and you see the clockwork precision of his design. More recently, though, in movies like “Split,” “Glass” and “Old,” the ending is where everything goes haywire, and the springs of the clockwork fly out of the mechanism.

With the ending to “Knock at the Cabin,” the ending just  … happens. There’s no brilliant summation, and no disaster. It ends like a solid thriller is supposed to end, as if Shyamalan’s biggest twist is to deliver a movie that is well-constructed and goes pretty much where you expect it to go.

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‘Knock at the Cabin’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 100 minutes.