Is It Woke?: M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Knock At The Cabin’

The answer to the question posed in the headline of this essay depends on what definition of woke, a hot button political word that has become a kind of online ideological Rorschach test, we’re using. To conservatives, “woke” is a rhetorical junk drawer that can mean anything from “annoying moral scold” to “sexual predator,” depending on the mood and emotional state of the person using the word.

But according to a recent USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll, 56% of Americans think the word is “positive” and can mean being “aware of social injustices.”

I like to think “woke” means “being empathetic,” and M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock At The Cabin is a compassionate, soulful, apocalyptic thriller about family, sacrifice, faith, and reason. It asks its audience to step into different people’s shoes, including the charismatic side of beef chief Dave Bautista, who delivers an intense yet gentle performance as one of four doomed prophets. He steals every scene, even while wearing tiny Ben Franklin glasses.

So, yes, Knock At The Cabin is woke, and it’s one of Shyamalan’s finest movies in years. It is another journey through the Shyamalan Zone, a dimension of paranormal menace and subversive social allegory. But it’s also surprisingly intimate for a movie about the end of the world.

You can stream it on Peacock now, and I recommend it.

But some critics think Knock at the Cabin is woke for negative reasons. These accusations are predictably superficial and rooted in prejudice.

More than a few social media goblins whine that Knock at the Cabin is woke purely because the main characters are two married white men, played by Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff, who have an adopted Asian daughter. Their hatred of diversity is knee-jerk and intense.

Did this movie need to be about a same-sex couple? No. Did the daughter have to be adopted? Asian? Probably not, on both counts. All this movie needed was a remote cabin, a quartet of strangers bearing terrible news, and a loving family.

Groff and Aldridge are fantastic as a couple who are both flawed but committed to each other and their seven-year-old, Wen, played by the charming Kristen Cui.

I struggle to be empathetic sometimes, but I am learning to accept that far too many fully grown adults are permanently threatened by depictions of non-traditional families in Hollywood. Some of those folks are highly religious, while others are simply a lost generation of mostly young white straight men who feel duty-bound to defend a culture they think belongs to them.

Knock At The Cabin starts as a home invasion horror flick, a solid genre that usually pits the middle class against homicidal maniacs. In this case, it’s a family on vacation versus a foursome of haunted doomsayers. But then the plot is revealed, and expectations are subverted.

The four strangers, led by Bautista, break into the titular cabin, tie up Wen’s fathers, and then share the visions they’ve been having: Groff, Aldridge, and Wen have been chosen to save every life on Earth but to do so, one of them must die.  If the sacrifice doesn’t happen, the family will survive, but no one else will. The drama unfolds within the cabin as Bautista and the others plead their case. Each time Groff and Aldridge’s characters refuse to make the decision, the strangers ritualistically kill one of their own with gruesome homemade weapons. Meanwhile, the news starts to report sudden plagues and disasters worldwide.

The other three horsemen are Abby Quinn, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Rupert Grint as, respectively, a gentle cook, a tortured nurse, and a bruiser with a shady past. Along with Bautista, they’re adapted from  Paul G. Tremblay’s 2018 novel The Cabin At The End Of The World, a claustrophobic parable that asks what is worth dying and living for.

It can be a little didactic at times, but Knock At The Cabin is Shyamalan’s most disciplined work in years, not that his movies aren’t dependably entertaining. They are, even the worst ones. The last movie he made prior to Knock being filmed, Old, was a high-concept horror-adjacent hoot best enjoyed as a master director taking risks deep into his career. Like Knock, it’s a movie about a family on vacation, only this family finds itself on a mysterious beach that accelerates aging. The result is Swiss cheese subplots about little kids in grown bodies and a middle-aged couple grappling with their premature decrepitude.

It’s not that Knock On The Cabin isn’t chock full of head-scratching moments. Still, Shyamalan keeps the narrative grounded and focused on what’s essential: regular, loving people under incredible pressure, and like most of Shyamalan’s best, it delivers a spine-tingling and uplifting ending that invites comparisons to the classic TV show The Twilight Zone, created by its chainsmoking narrator, Rod Serling.

The Twilight Zone is famous for last-minute twists, but some of the show’s most significant episodes are solemn meditations on empathy and social justice. The truth is Serling was woke decades before the right started gleefully vilifying concepts like empathy and social justice. He wrote dark little sci-fi morality plays, and Shyamalan’s deeply personal supernatural movies have carried that tradition for decades. 

So, is Knock At The Cabin woke?

Evidence For: The combination of same-sex marriage, a homophobia subplot, and transnational, transracial adoption will earn this movie a hard “woke” from right-wing cultural warriors who think opposing diversity is a personality. 

Evidence Against: Two Christian themes run throughout Knock at the Cabin, albeit stripped of any evangelical language. First, this is a movie about the Rapture. The end is nigh. And there’s the “Sophie’s Choice” the family has to make: the only way to prevent God’s judgment is for one of them to die for the sins of all mankind, which was partly Christ’s mission. Shyamalan buries these theological undercurrents beneath a story about a same-sex couple and their Asian daughter. Also, one of the husbands owns a handgun he keeps in a gun safe. (The movie is anti-gun safe.)

Final Judgment: The movie doesn’t get on a soapbox. There are no political lectures. It’s a straightforward thriller about a family forced to make an impossible choice. Simple. If it’s woke, it’s because Shamalyan wants his audience to sympathize with every character on screen, regardless of background or state of mind.

 John DeVore is a sensitive and thoughtful writer living in New Woke City. His favorite movie is Fiddler On The Roof, followed by Hellraiser. Follow his politically-correct narcissism on Twitter.