Nothing would induce me to reveal what happens in “Knock at the Cabin,” the new film from M. Night Shyamalan. Nothing, that is, except for the fact that Shyamalan has already given away the basics of the plot in a couple of candid trailers. When did he become so generous in spilling the beans? Remember, this is the guy who made “The Sixth Sense” (1999), which held on tight to its beans right up to the final spill.
The new movie springs from a 2018 novel, Paul Tremblay’s “The Cabin at the End of the World,” so readers of the book, at least, will arrive at the cinema well versed in the terrors to come. For anyone else, here goes: a seven-year-old girl, Wen (Kristen Cui), goes on vacation with her fathers, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge). They have taken a remote but cozy dwelling, on a lake, in rural Pennsylvania. This is a clear case of asking for trouble, given that earlier Shyamalan shockers, like “Signs” (2002) and “The Village” (2004), are set in similar seclusion. The happy holiday, in “Knock at the Cabin,” is interrupted by four strangers, who bring rusty tools and unwelcome news: the family must kill one of its own—Eric, Andrew, or Wen. Without such a sacrifice, all of humanity will perish. No big deal.
The chief of the invaders is a teacher named Leonard. He is played by Dave Bautista, who wears spectacles, presumably to indicate that he is, contrary to appearances, a thoughtful soul. You might as well dangle a pine-scented air freshener from the barrel of a tank. Yet there is a shade of gentleness in his opening scene, which is at once the least violent and the most affecting passage in the movie—a demonstration of what Shyamalan can still do, with aplomb, when moved by the spirit of menace. We see Leonard in long shot, emerging from a crowd of trees and, from Wen’s point of view, hard to make out. (She is busy gathering grasshoppers and trapping them in a jar. Symbolism alert!) Coming up close, Leonard towers over her, before shaking hands and explaining that he wants to be her friend. “My heart is broken,” he tells her, “because of what I have to do today.” The creepiness is all the more insistent for being so rueful and polite. The camera catches Wen at oblique angles, on the slant, as if she, and everything she knows, is about to be turned upside down.
Wen runs inside and alerts her fathers, who barricade every point of entry and prepare to repel the intrusion. Nice try. Before long, they are trussed up and confronted with Leonard and his little helpers: Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a nurse; Adrienne (Abby Quinn), a cook; and Redmond (Rupert Grint), who works for a gas company. I wish that I could watch the leading actors from the “Harry Potter” franchise without being nagged by memories of their collective past, but I can’t. Grint will forever be Ron Weasley, and so, in Shyamalan’s new film, however savagely Redmond brandishes his lethal weapon, you keep expecting Wen to shout, “Drop it, Ron! Expelliarmus!”
So, what binds this unlikely quartet of doom? Well, they have all experienced visions that summoned them to the sylvan glade and compelled them to issue the fateful challenge. As a driving cause, this sounds a bit flimsy, and, to begin with, Eric and Andrew assume that they’ve been targeted by apocalyptic fruitcakes—or, perhaps, by militant homophobes, angry at same-sex marriage. (There is a narrative wrinkle that supports this thesis, if only for a while.) Hang on, though. No sooner have Eric and Andrew refused to play the sacrificial game, if that’s what it is, than the TV in the cabin starts to show tidal waves pounding the West Coast and planes falling out of the sky. Could it be that Leonard and his fellow-prophets are not talking nonsense, after all? Eric, for one, is half persuaded. “I saw something,” he says. “There was something in the light.”
This is scarcely the first occasion on which Shyamalan has laced a story with religious flavoring. Think of the former minister, in “Signs,” who eventually returns to the fold, or of the writer, in “Lady in the Water” (2006), whose wise words will allegedly inspire a future savior of the land. (Shyamalan cast himself as the writer. Not his finest hour.) No surprise, then, that “Knock at the Cabin” feels so portentous. The score, by Herdís Stefánsdóttir, is a kind of musical thundercloud, and the dialogue has an oracular growl to match. According to Leonard, “God’s finger will scorch the Earth”—not, I suspect, a line that Bautista, once a pro wrestler, used that often in the W.W.E. If this is his subtlest role to date, it’s because Leonard seems so pained at his own jeremiads, tamping down any hint of swagger and unwilling to crow over the end of days. He’s ready to rumble, but he’s sorry.
Regrettably, the other characters have no such claim on our attention, and, for some reason, the movie doesn’t cling and stick as it should. A film like Jeff Nichols’s “Take Shelter” (2011), which told of another family under threat, and which was no less littered with omens of Armageddon, including tsunamis, had far more staying power. One problem is that too much of “Knock at the Cabin” takes place in the cabin; at times, it has the smack of a well-made play, or, at any rate, a technical exercise in dread. Shyamalan, to be fair, has lost none of his compositional devilry; notice his bisecting of the screen with clean vertical lines—the trunk of a tree, or the edge of a shower curtain, behind which somebody may or may not lurk. But these frights are not enough to fill a tale, and they are padded out, to minimal effect, by flashbacks to the pre-calamity lives of Eric, Andrew, and Wen. Like we care.
Thanks to “The Sixth Sense,” the first thing that people ask about any Shyamalan film is: How’s the twist? This is a serious matter. No jolt is more intoxicating to the moviegoer than that of being fooled, and, as one of the dumbasses who failed to spot the payoff coming in “The Village,” I prayed for more of the same in “Knock at the Cabin,” and lingered until the twilight of the end credits, just in case. So, was satisfaction delivered, or should audiences brace themselves for the bummer of a twistless thriller? I couldn’t possibly comment.
To flee from the gulping claustrophobia of “Knock at the Cabin” into the open spaces of “Godland,” a new movie written and directed by Hlynur Pálmason, should be a blessed escape. If you can’t breathe freely in the wilds of Iceland, where most of the story is set, where can you? A waterfall, measureless to man, dwarfs two figures who stand at its base and rejoice in its spray; a bare foot, in closeup, sinks into a green sponge of wet moss. The strange thing is that, as the film unfolds, the beauty of the place grows ever more unforgiving. It resembles another planet, fresh from the act of creation, but it feels like a prison.
A youthful priest named Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), bony and bewildered, is sent from Denmark to Iceland, where a church is to be built before the assault of winter. We are, I would guess, in the middle of the second half of the nineteenth century, given that Lucas, an eager photographer, takes with him a crate-size camera and a box of large glass plates—such fun for the horses that have to carry his stuff. He could have sailed to his destination, a coastal community, but he’s determined, as he says, to “get to know” the country.
He has his wish. If you really want to improve your knowledge at ground level, there’s nothing like sliding from your saddle as you ride, brawling on rocks beside the sea, or tumbling into treacle-thick mud in your devotional robes. Those are but some of Lucas’s trials. Being a Danish speaker, he must also contend with the Icelandic tongue, which, as he discovers, has a long—and necessary—list of words for “rain.” More galling than anything, though, is the abrasion of Lucas’s faith. Lying in his tent, and lighting a candle, he addresses the Almighty, saying, “You need not be here.”
“Godland” is split into two parts. Having survived his trek across the interior, with the help of his wise and all but indestructible guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurðsson), Lucas reaches the haven of a home. His host is Carl (Jacob Hauberg Lohmann), who lives there with his children, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne) and Ída—played by the director’s own daughter, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdottír, and so rosy with health and good humor that she rebukes the punitive gloom that envelops Lucas like a mist. Posing for a photograph, Ída sprawls full-length along the back of her shaggy pony, as if on a comfortable couch. Such is one secret of this extraordinary film, and of its power to exhilarate: the shock of emotional vigor, arising from the continual rub of physical texture and effort. These folk, under siege from the elements, fight back. Thus, beside the church, in the course of communal festivities, Lucas is cajoled into wrestling first with Carl and then with the mighty Ragnar, under the gaze of Anna and Ída. They could be watching Jacob and the Angel. Like trees, however, angels rarely prosper here, at the volcanic end of the world. ♦