Forgiveness is a concept I've been wrestling with all my life. "To err is human; to forgive, divine," said the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope, and that sentiment formed an uneasy bridge across my own Christian upbringing, which awkwardly straddled the compassionate teachings of Jesus with the Old Testament-esque fire and brimstone favored by the Book of Revelation. Growing up gay in the middle of this tug-of-war left lifelong scars upon my psyche. When do well-meaning people become dangerous? At what point does forgiveness become impossible, and self-preservation turns into the only act of sanity left?
Anyway, consider me more than a little bit surprised when all of these old wounds got fresh spears poked in them by the latest M. Night Shyamalan entertainment out at the multiplex. Knock at the Cabin is a home-invasion thriller that stars Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge as Eric and Andrew, a gay couple with an adopted daughter, Wen (Kristen Cui), who head to the woods for a long weekend only to find themselves confronted by four oddly meek Horsepeople of the Apocalypse (led by an ace Dave Bautista). The foursome, fueled by visions of Armageddon, tell the family they need to kill a member of their own — or else the world will end for every single human life on Earth except the three of them. They'll be left to wander in desolate devastation for the remainder of their days.
That vision — of a planet wiped clean, of eternal loneliness — brought me right back. The link between my own gayness and the Apocalypse is one I had pounded into my head, week after week, by my church teachers. Starting with my own grandmother, who taught my Sunday school class, up until I gathered the will to stop going to the Assembly of God in my late teen years, there was one constant amid the many contradictions of Christianity: Gay was bad. Gay was a sin. A sin that would leave me behind.
In class, we watched the Thief in the Night series of films (a horror-tinged precursor to the more action-packed Left Behinds of the aughts), which were all about the nightmare visited upon those unworthy folks who missed the Rapture and weren't delivered unto Heaven. Plagues and unending torment became inextricably linked with love in my mind. (That I grew up during the height of the AIDS pandemic didn't exactly help things.)
Eric and Andrew's responses are based on how their families of origin treated them.
So Gayness and the End Times, we've got a checkered past. And the way that Eric and Andrew react to this ultimatum set before them with no good answer is a study in contrasts. Eric, who suffers a concussion during the initial invasion, remains quiet and internally wrestles with the situation. But Andrew screams. Andrew screams and fights and says, "Fuck, no!" to what they're selling.
Brief flashbacks scattered across the film give us some backstory on how these two men got to this place. We're told that Eric's mother is accepting of her son's gayness at the same moment we're shown Andrew's parents are anything but. And we see Andrew get gay-bashed, then become obsessed with self-defense. He takes up boxing. He buys a gun. His chosen family of Eric, and soon after, Wen, become Andrew's everything. His whole world.
Shyamalan is precise (some might say simple) in the connections he makes between character and plot. Echoing how in Signs it's Joaquin Phoenix's former baseball stardom that will save the day when he swings the hell out that bat and sends those aliens packing, Knock at the Cabin whispers enough of these characters' histories to define their present choices and behaviors. We see and we feel and we do understand why Andrew (and it must be said that Ben Aldridge is terrifically good in the film) reacts as he does to what these people are asking of him. And that the film goes as far as it does in its plain and unpretentious manner to empathize with queer rage really is something.
Let the planes crash as long as we're left alone for once. Haven't we earned some peace in this world?
I'll admit that I identified deeply with Andrew's rage — with his immediate and absolute repulsion at the notion of giving up the very thing he's already given up so much to preserve. Alienated from the family we're born into simply because of who we are and love, so many queer people are forced to invent new families whole cloth. Having just experienced an international emergency in the real world in the form of the COVID pandemic, I understand only too well how easy it can be to isolate with the family I actively made for myself when my blood relations become too toxic.
And, like Andrew, I would have trouble finding ways to give a shit about anything outside of that bubble if asked. In truth, I could happily stay home baking cakes and watching movies with my boyfriend forever, as long as the world’s burning stayed firmly on the other side of the door. Let the planes crash as long as we're left alone for once. Haven't we earned some peace in this world?
Knock at the Cabin centers on a queer perspective.
I know that selfish protective instinct isn’t by any means unique to same-sex families. Most parents and loving couples would react the exact same way if presented with the impossible choice in Knock at the Cabin. But placing the query to queers does assert its own precise complications. And to its benefit, Shyamalan's movie doesn’t ignore that; it embraces and explores a queer perspective. It centers the sacrifices and the difficulties that same-sex couples and parents have had to deal with above and beyond their mainstream counterparts. Shyamalan truly aims to put everyone into our shoes, and strives to ennoble gay love as hard-won; like a diamond beaten down, we're more gorgeous for our battle scars. Sure, it would be great to go without them, to slide through a somewhat easier path. But we make for tough people, and it's a thrill and a pleasure to see that centered in a mainstream movie like this.
Shyamalan truly aims to put everyone into our shoes, and strives to ennoble gay love as hard-won; like a diamond beaten down, we're more gorgeous for our battle scars.
Of course, Shyamalan, like the trickster god of Abraham and Job, must also demand his sacrifice. Differing from the source material, Paul Tremblay's 2018 novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, Shyamalan decides that his gays so love the world they will give their only begotten Groff.
Eric, the quiet one, receives a knock upside the head that gives him his own visions. He sees a figure made out of light among them, and he sees a future where Andrew and Wen live happily ever after. So he blissfully sacrifices himself via Andrew's distraught hand to avert the apocalypse. Shyamalan, ever the cock-eyed optimist, insists on a way through the wilderness. Forgiveness, he contends, is imperative.
Although he's spent his career being compared to Hitchcock (and his in-film cameos seem to beg for it), Shyamalan has never really been as ruthless as Hitch. All stories might be about trapping your characters under a scenario's microscope to see what makes them tick, but Knock at the Cabin is really just one question it takes him one hundred minutes to answer. And it's one his films have wrestled with time and again: Is grace truly possible? Can the seeing of dead people bring us emotional closure? Is a tropical beach that makes us age rapidly actually a gift that forces us to treasure every passing moment? And is there some way for humanity to look upon those it has harmed the most and truly ask them for forgiveness? To find a way past all that injury, unto grace?
In Knock at the Cabin, the whole of the human race — save the four doomed souls who converge on that cabin — stays unaware of what's being demanded in its name. But it's a battle that plays out in homes and families like my own every day. The world came knocking for me eventually, and like this film says, there is no good answer to it; not the way things are now. Somebody ends up hurt. Somebody gives too much of themselves for another person who really doesn't deserve it. C'est la vie, such is life. And the world keeps spinning, scarring us up as it goes.
Knock at the Cabin is now in theaters.
