More troubling memories include Wen’s obsession with looking at pictures of herself as an infant, Andrew’s decision to buy a gun, and their ominous conversation when educating Wen about the dangerous weapon hidden in their house. We not only learn about the vicious hate crime Andrew survived (before he met Eric in the novel), but we experience the couple’s first chance encounter with each other as well as their trip to China to adopt Wen. The novel fleshes out the story’s details with a shifting point of view that amplifies the horrific choice Eric and Andrew face. Grint may falter a bit with a Massachusetts accent, but his Redmond evokes the same seething hostility as Tremblay’s version of the character. Each performance closely mirrors their literary counterpart with Bautista in particular bringing the gentle giant Leonard to life. Shyamalan captures the rustic isolation of the cabin as well as the slowly building tension and shocking acts of violence described in the text. The first two acts of Shyamalan’s adaptation are remarkably faithful to Tremblay’s novel.
Shyamalan puts his thumbs on the scales and dramatically changes Tremblay’s conclusion, shifting the story’s empathetic core and telling the audience in no uncertain terms who should be sacrificed and who should be saved. He references William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in which a dominant majority sacrifices a group of othered survivors to maintain control of the community and appease a monstrous deity who turns out to be a mirage. Tremblay’s novel ends on an ambiguous note and an afterword describes the story as an “empathy test” for the reader. Four strangers, Leonard ( Dave Bautista), Sabrina ( Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane ( Abby Quinn), and Redmond ( Rupert Grint) have come to present them with a choice: choose and kill a member of their family or unleash the apocalypse.Ī significant amount of marketing for Shyamalan’s adaptation of the book, titled Knock at the Cabin, has been built around this decision with audiences commanded to “make the choice” in the movie’s tagline.
Tremblay’s novel follows Andrew ( Ben Aldridge) and Eric ( Jonathan Groff), a couple vacationing with their daughter Wen ( Kristen Cui) at a Pennsylvania lake house when a knock at their door pits their family’s survival against the continuation of humanity. The story of an isolated cabin housing an apocalyptic choice seems well-suited for a director who has built his name with intimate stories that shake the foundations of everything we know. Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World feels like the perfect source material for an M.
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