It’s moreso when Shyamalan brings it back in the movie’s final scene. In one flashback to happier, more pre-apocalyptic times, we see the family of three singing along in their car to KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes,” and even then, its unbridled peppiness feels like a bit of a sick joke. It’s a Hobson’s choice, a cruel parody of agency, one that the movie tries to disguise by burying it under a truckload of sentimentality. If they don’t do the deed, Andrew and Eric and Wen will survive, but they’ll be the only ones, left to wander the lifeless, smoking ruin of earth, “permanently and cosmically alone,” knowing that they having stood by and let billions die. Night Shyamalan’s kids see dead people, but they don’t become them.) Sure, there’s technically an out. All we see is a man struggling to come to terms with what we already know is true.īecause we know it’s true, and because there’s nothing in the dialogue that suggests there’s any way to detour around Armageddon, eventually all we’re waiting to find out is whether Andrew will kill Eric, or the other way around. If they’re meant to sow genuine ambiguity, they don’t. But his rationalizations don’t even convince his partner, let alone the audience. Andrew, the couple’s designated skeptic, tries to come up with some way that this could all be a hoax: Maybe the group timed their entry to coincide with news reports of a tsunami hitting the Pacific coast, and perhaps the second horseman’s death was timed to sync up with a pre-recorded broadcast on a viral outbreak. No matter how long the two of them try to deny what’s happening, it becomes clear that, to quote 28 Days Later, the end is extremely fucking nigh. But by the end of the movie, that choice hardly seems like one at all. They can’t kill themselves, or kill another by accident-they must decide, and follow through. Their sacrifice will only work if it’s an act of will. Throughout the movie, Leonard underlines the notion of choice. And that goes for Andrew and Eric as well. They might as well be lined up before a firing squad. The horsemen not only die as prophesized but in the order that’s prescribed. But Shyamalan’s movie, on which he shares screenplay credit with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, is orderly to a fault. Tremblay’s novel is substantially more chaotic. Knock at the Cabin’s gloss on the Christian tradition is so superficial it verges on nonsensical.
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