Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan, 2023) (Patreon)

Read the room, Night. This is a terrible time to be making such an incoherent statement about gay parenting, in part because that incoherence can easily be mistaken for insight. Why have a family with two dads, and have the antagonists repeatedly claim that their being gay had no relevance to the sacrifice they were being asked to make, when from the family's point of view -- especially Andrew (Ben Aldridge), who was not only rejected by his own parents but the victim of a senseless homophobic assault -- their being gay is entirely relevant. "We're being targeted," Andrews laments. "They've always targeted us."

The fact that Leonard (Dave Bautista) and company are not targeting these men and their child doesn't change the fact that this demand of a sacrifice is the final chapter in the life of a family that has consistently been told they are illegitimate. Even young Wen (Kristen Cui) sees this, telling Leonard that the counselor at her school constantly tells her how great it is she has two dads, "but it feels like she's saying the opposite." The ostensible randomness of Wen, Andrew, and Eric (Jonathan Groff) being selected for this Abraham/Isaac 2023 nonsense only gives weight to homophobic conservatives who like to insist that marginalized people are obsessed with their own marginality, and never stop complaining about it.

I was already prepared to call bullshit on this whole endeavor when I read Scott Renshaw's review, which compares Shyamalan's adaptation to the original novel by Paul Tremblay. Where the book maintains a fundamental ambiguity, leaving the crisis of faith for the reader to contend with, Shyamalan makes it absolutely clear that in his story, the doomsayers were correct, their visions apparently divinely inspired. Now, this isn't exactly a surprise from this filmmaker. Remember that Signs was resolved with a series of unfathomable coincidences that proved that He had the whole world in his hands. But this is of a different order.

Shyamalan probably considers himself a spiritually inclined filmmaker, but Knock at the Cabin confirms him to be something stranger and even oxymoronic. He's an ecumenical fundamentalist. None of the four horse-people of the apocalypse ever mentions God, which I suppose provides an out. But theirs is the language of end-times evangelicalism, and the fact that these visions came to them unbidden -- that none of them were exactly fervent believers, and had their doubts about their mission -- only serves to cement the truthfulness of fundamentalist eschatology. When the time comes, the nonbelievers will be forced to believe. The blind see, the deaf hear, etc.

So when Andrew and Eric try to defend their family against what certainly seems to be a home invasion by a team of schizophrenics, their defense is explicitly solipsistic. Andrew states that he will gladly let the rest of the world die in order to protect his family, that he owes the world nothing. Does Shyamalan have any idea how this sounds? How many times have evangelicals argued that selfish desires, like living a proud gay life or reinventing the structure of the family, will prove to be civilization's downfall? These uppity gays want to have their perverse "family" because they want it, and they don't care who or what it decimates.

While watching Knock at the Cabin, I thought a lot about Frailty, the 2001 film starring and directed by Bill Paxton. In that film, the family patriarch is blinded by an angelic vision, which then permits him to see that many ordinary people in the world are actually "demons," who it is his job to destroy. His son Adam believes his dad and helps him kill people, whereas his older son Fenton thinks his dad has gone insane. In the end, guess what? The father is right, he is not a deranged serial killer but a righteous soldier in God's army. Knock at the Cabin is a lot like Frailty in microcosm, with one key difference. Leonard and the other mystics are not allowed to kill Andrew or Eric. Rather, they must convince these men to give up their happiness in order to spare the rest of the world God's wrathful judgment. No amount of gliding, well-appointed cinematography can make this odious message go down smoothly.