Brief Notes on Knock at the Cabin (2023), by M. Night Shyamalan

Shyamalan's cinema has always had, as a central theme, the question of faith — the struggle between a rational, atheistic view of seemingly extraordinary events and a resignation to the failure of rationally grasping the mystery of life. When his characters run into something absurd, unbelievable, and out of the ordinary, they always move between these two registers of thought: the initial attempt to rationalize the crop circles as a prank by local kids in Signs (2002), the initial diagnosis of schizophrenia made by child psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe about the psychic child played by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, and the statement made by a psychologist character (played by Nikki Amuka-Bird, who also appears in Knock at the Cabin), after witnessing people on a beach age a year in an hour in Old (2021): "We must be going through some kind of collective psychosis!"

The struggle between accepting something impossible to explain and trying to fit the unprecedented into recognizable conceptual "boxes" drives the general tension of Knock at the Cabin, one of Shyamalan's most direct films in this sense, positioning its two lead characters (the couple played by Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge) as almost representing the two sides of that coin: while the latter maintains a critical, skeptical stance toward everything the intruders say (arguing that the apocalyptic footage is pre-recorded, that they're part of a Heaven's Gate-style suicide cult), the other begins a process of erosion of what he should identify as the most logical explanation for the event, and gradually starts believing the more fantastical explanation.

With this, Shyamalan continues to affirm himself as one of the few commercial filmmakers dealing with the question of faith in something transcending oneself, and the villain of his films is always the attempt to belittle something that is, in itself, extraordinary — the film critic in Lady in the Water (2006), played by Bob Balaban, and the psychiatrist played by Sarah Paulson in Glass (2019), are the most cursed figures in his cinema precisely because of their absolute disbelief that life can bring something new, unforeseen, never seen or thought of before its appearance, and his cinema is a constant struggle over how to represent that miracle, whether it's a boy who sees ghosts or a family that manages to avert the apocalypse.

I'm going to rewatch the film, there are several elements I want to reflect on more (especially how M. Night is one of the few directors of mise-en-scène working in a Hollywood devastated by a generalized amnesia about how to compose an image, a staging, a mood, an atmosphere...), but something that stands out to me is how this film continues a thread Shyamalan has been pulling since 1999: in his cinema, having faith is, at once, an act of survival and of resistance to dominant, rationalizing, mortifying patterns.