Spoiler Alert: Character Arcs and Functionality in 'Knock at the Cabin'

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Written by M. Night Shyamalan

Starring Dave Bautista, Nikki Amuka Bird, Kristin Cui, Rupert Grint, Jonathan Groff, Abby Quinn, Ben Aldridge

Release Date February 3rd, 2023

Published February 3rd, 2023

Knock at the Cabin is a horror thriller about the apocalypse. Four characters, played by Dave Bautista, Abby Quinn, Rupert Grint, and Nikki Amuka Bird, travel to a cabin in Pennsylvania where they hope to avert a worldwide apocalypse. To do this, they must convince a family of three, played by Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge and their daughter played by Kristin Cui, to willing sacrifice one member of their family. The four visitors have had a shared vision of the future and received a vague prophecy related to this specific cabin and whoever lives there.

In this article we are going to examine the character arcs and how they function in M. Night Shyamalan's nightmare fantasy of the end of the world. To do that, there will be spoilers. If you are wanting to see Knock at the Cabin, you should see the movie first and then come back and engage with this article.

Leonard - Played by Dave Bautista, over the course of Knock at the Cabin we learn that Leonard is a schoolteacher and that he coaches middle school sports. Leonard is big and imposing but has a gentle quality as he demonstrates upon meeting Wen, the young daughter of Eric and Andrew. As he joins Wen to catch Grasshoppers for a school project, Leonard gently works to make Wen comfortable before he is compelled to reveal why he has come to this mostly empty stretch of Pennsylvania forest.

Leonard is the de-facto leader of the four people who come to the cabin. It's Leonard who reveals the prophecy and the details of the apocalypse and that each of his fellow visitors will die until Eric and Andrew make a decision about which of them should die to save humanity. And that's pretty much it. Leonard appears wise and Dave Bautista invests him with a particular passion that is very compelling but, he doesn't change much as we see him. The biggest change in Leonard's life happens entirely off-screen.

By the time that Leonard has arrived at the cabin, he's a devotee of this apocalypse plan and doesn't waver. Perhaps his arc is coming to accept his own fate, dying by his own hand, but again, it's not an arc. Instead of having an arc where he starts at one point of an emotional or physical journey and ends in a different emotional and or physical place, Leonard is a functional character. Leonard exists to motivate change in Eric and Andrew. I am not saying this as a negative critique, I'm just establishing how he functions in this story.

Abby - Abby is a line cook and a mother of a son named Charlie. She enjoys cooking and likes making people happy. Like Leonard, the biggest arc of her life happened off screen. Finding Leonard and the rest via a message board and going to Pennsylvania to carry out their role in trying to prevent the apocalypse, happens before we meet Abby. What we see of Abby is that she is manic, anxious, and a little panicked but also motherly, and sweet, she makes a lovely breakfast for Wen. Her nervous manner, even when being kind, never changes until her character is killed to set off another plague of the apocalypse. Like Leonard, she functions as a motivator for Andrew and Eric.

Sabrina - Sabrina is a nurse and a supremely kind woman. Though she uses a weapon to break into the cabin in violent fashion, when Eric is injured during the home invasion, Sabrina tends to him and cares for him. She goes out of her way to make Eric comfortable as he has suffered a concussion during the brawl. It's likely just how she was as a nurse, a caring, loving, presence. Like her fellow visitors, her arc happened offscreen as she went from a full time nurse with a family to someone who drove 6 hours to be at this place, at this time, to try and stop the apocalypse. Her death doesn't go as planned but she seems prepared to accept it when it comes.

Redmond - Redmond is the last of our foursome and the only one who gets a scene outside of the main narrative. Redmond is belligerent and agitated but that's explained by the fact that he knows he's the first to die if Andrew and Eric fail to make a choice. It will come about through the arguing back and forth between Eric and Leonard, that Redmond knew Eric and Andrew before coming to the cabin. As Eric recalls, Redmond approached him and Andrew at a bar in Boston and assaulted Eric with a beer bottle after having overheard the two men professing their love to each other.

This hate crime provides further evidence to Eric that what is happening in the cabin has nothing to do with an apocalypse and everything to do with discrimination against a loving gay couple and their adopted child. Redmond exists to provide that function. Redmond is here specifically to create doubt in the minds of Eric and Andrew about what is happening. It's an effective use of a character, the suspicion and doubt that Redmond's involvement creates drives the drama of the second and third act, even after Redmond laid down his life as the first to die.

So what about Eric and Andrew? What arc are they on as our main characters? That's an interesting question and one I am not sure I have a satisfactory answer to. Eric and Andrew begin the story as innocent, loving parents to an adopted child. They start the story as a couple very much in love and they end the story with one of them sacrificing his life to save the other. Andrew has a vision of the future in which Eric raises their child and Wen goes on to thrive in a world that narrowly survives a massive apocalypse that kills thousands upon thousands of people.

There is no question that these two men are forever changed by what happens to them in Knock at the Cabin but it's not necessarily an arc. Eric perhaps journey's from being resentful of a world that has discriminated against him to being slightly less concerned about discrimination and more fiercely devoted to providing a future for Wen but that's a big stretch on my part. Andrew meanwhile, goes from being happy being alive to willingly dying to save his family and the rest of what's left of the world. Would you call that an arc? I guess, he's certainly changed by the end, going from alive to dead, but is that an arc?

In the end, examining the characters of Knock at the Cabin you have to accept that these characters are essentially functional cogs in a film thriller. These characters are here to build, sustain, and release ever rising and falling tension and suspense. Scenes build to frightening and violent crescendos, descend back to a simmering tension, and build back to a boiling point. All the while, our emotions and excitement rise and fall along with movie. That could be said of a lot of movies but it is particularly skillfully achieved in Knock at the Cabin.

Writer-Director M. Night Shyamalan is really good at conducting a human symphony of emotional rises and falls. Knock at the Cabin is quite effective at building and releasing tension, causing the audience to have their breath catch in their throat as another scene builds and builds until a violent strike occurs and resets the tension. As this happens, Shyamalan manipulates us with his reputation as a master of twist endings. Shyamalan is synonymous with the twist ending and you are expecting a big twist in Knock at the Cabin so much that it creates a meta-level of tension on top of what the actual scenes in the film are creating.

So, is there a twist in Knock at the Cabin? I don't think so, at least not in the traditional sense. Nothing in the marketing of Knock at the Cabin seemed to try and hide the apocalypse happening. The film is relatively straight forward that these normal, workaday folks aren't evil, they legitimately are here on purpose, driven by an unknown force to enact their parts in a plot. Why them? And Why Eric and Andrew? That's never established. Not revealing that part of the plot is another functional element of the thriller plot of Knock at the Cabin.

Not telling you why this is happening is intended to disorient you and keep your mind reeling while Shyamalan manipulates the other elements of the story, allowing these characters to plead their case for the apocalypse and for Eric and Andrew to defend their love for each other and their daughter and why they might be willing to let the world end rather than harm their family. The tension inherent in the premise, the 'what would you do' question at the heart of Knock at the Cabin is a satisfying plot driver that, for me, excuses having characters who don't have a traditional narrative arc.

In the end, Knock at the Cabin is an example of efficient thriller storytelling that effectively uses terrific actors to play out one single 'what would you do (?) scenario in the form of a horror thriller. It's some of the most effective filmmaking of M. Night Shyamalan's career and a terrific showcase for a wonderful cast who have to invest a lot of life in characters who start the film and end their part of the film relatively unchanged, aside from their demise, of course.

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