‘A Knock on the Door’: Who Wants to Save the World?

It’s always curious when several different productions that emerge from the same premise happen to be released at the same time. Reasonable similarities can be obvious things like ‘Antz’ and ‘Bichos’, both from 1998; ‘The illusionist’ and ‘The final trick’, both from 2006; or the 3 Snow Whites that filled the 2012 billboard; but there are also sometimes more subtle and much more interesting coincidences, such as the fact that ‘Alcarràs’ and ‘As bestas’, two of the best Spanish films of 2022, deal with the chiaroscuro of renewable energies of two very different genres, with premises, even opposing styles and points of view. Saving distances, ‘There’s a Knock on the Door’, the new film by M. Night Shyamalan, arrives simultaneously with ‘The Last of Us, the courageous adaptation of the popular Naughty Dog video game that HBO Max launched, and both , being so different try to answer the same questions: Is there hope in humanity? Is it worth sacrificing yourself to save him?

After catching the whole world off guard with ‘The Sixth Sense’, completely changing the meaning of everything we had seen in ‘The Forest’ after an hour of shooting or throwing us off our seat with the last seconds of ‘Multiple’, Shyamalan carries the label of being the king of the twist, when in reality what unites his entire filmography, what never fails, is that terror, thriller or action are the perfect cover to talk about love and faith. ‘Knock on the Door’ is a love story in a big way, as big as life itself, even if the premise to talk about something like this seems crazy: four strangers take a couple and their daughter hostage in a hut because they are were chosen to prevent the apocalypse

The home invasion stories, the home invasion, is probably one of the most terrifying archetypes in the genre. It is worth not believing in ghosts and that you are sure that no monsters live under your bed, but the idea that your home, your safe space, can become the real scene of a nightmare, that is, an anguish that you can share all over the world. Playing on this fear, ‘Knock on the door’ doesn’t mince words and Dave Bautista is one of the first to appear on the screen. The presence of him, huge in real life and huge in Wen’s (Kristen Cui) point of view, is at times as touching as it is haunting all the time, and from then on there is no respite for the audience. The tension only builds at an inexorable rate when four strangers approach the cabin with an impossible request: that a family member be sacrificed to save all of humanity. If they take too long to make a decision or decide not to, it will be the kidnappers who will have to kill someone to unleash the different natural catastrophes that will devastate the world.

While the director is not keen on inserting graphic violence into his films and even into his superhero adventure ‘Glass (Cristal)’, the fights were choreographed that leapt straight from the pages of a comic book, the violent nature of ‘Lo they call the door’ it was impossible to dodge. Even so, Shyamalan chooses beauty above all else and leaves out of the picture what we don’t need to see, only feel, to be equally effective. If we enter the technical sections, we must highlight the direction, a meticulous and careful camera work, much more effective than makeup, which suffocates in close-ups and exploits the timing and shots to build tension and, incidentally, pay homage to itself . . It may be that Shyamalan is one of the people with the highest self-confidence and self-esteem that I know, and I say this with a certain amount of envy, so his fans will have no difficulty recognizing the shots we have seen before in his filmography, from the hands that they touch back and forth of the camera of ‘El protegido’, an asset that creeps time and time again throughout his work.

‘A knock at the door’ is not a film about character development, it’s a film about a situation, about a decision. We exit the cabin in flashbacks a few times, but only to learn more about the family, not the intruders, so we have to believe (or not) the here and now what they tell us, and connect with them, with the mystery that surrounds them, without knowing where they come from. This task is not exactly easy, which is why we must first highlight the work of Bautista, a former wrestler turned actor who is gradually proving that this is important to him and that if his talent is not innate, he will take care of work it. It’s not his first dramatic role, but ‘Knocking on the Door’ gave him a unique opportunity to show new records and carry the weight of a leading man. Alongside him is a wonderful Rupert Grint, who we have seen less on screen than we would have liked since ‘Harry Potter’; Nikki Amuka Bird and Abby Quinn. On the kidnapped side, Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge ooze chemistry as a couple and Kristen Cui debuts her as absolutely adorable.

We could talk about a roller coaster of emotions if the anxiety eased at some point, but the film is one more constant. As screen time runs out, more doubt and suspense is generated in the audience, who face Philippa Foot’s tram dilemma alongside the characters. And so we come to her main MA: While the film asks interesting questions, it also gives you all the answers. Shyamalan has done the reflection exercise for you, he has faced an ethical problem, he has come to a conclusion, he has bowed to it and here he gives it to you.

everything it hides

The film adapts Paul Tremblay’s novel ‘The Cabin at the End of the World’ which was first published in 2018 and gained new reading after the outbreak of COVID-19. The pandemic has been a global phenomenon that we have experienced cooped up at home, that has filled our lives with fear and so on forced to certain sacrifices to help others, from simple things like wearing a mask to having to give up accompanying our grandparents in their last moments. Everything to take care of the world. With that experience still so fresh and recently emerged from the Trump era, that the main couple is a homosexual couple and their daughter an adopted Chinese girl are the perfect context to judge a present and a society (the American one, but which can be extrapolated to the whole world) which in recent years has proved to be selfish, classist, racist and skeptical even in the face of the most evident scientific evidence.

While in 2022 in the United States women have lost the right to free and safe abortion and books on racial or LGTBIQ+ themes are literally banned from schools, obviously Andrew and Eric, the characters of Aldridge and Groff, start out convinced of what is told them about the end of the world is nothing more than a religious discourse part of a conversion therapy. The view they both have of the world, of what is good and bad in it, is inevitably conditioned by how the world has treated them, with acceptance and empathy or rejection and homophobia. From here, Shyamalan also introduces us to the domino effect of the culture of violence, after all, fear is the path to the dark side.

All of this is hidden in a solid and coherent script, where it doesn’t matter whether there are surprising twists or not. ‘Knock on the Door’ is captivating, it is a family drama, a horror film and an apocalyptic thriller, it’s so many things and it shifts between all those labels so easily that we can’t fit it into a single genre. It’s a trompe l’oeil, a love story with an air of dread, a fusion of emotions trying to shrink your love heart minutes after a shirt is bloodstained. As has been the case with his entire filmography, Shyamalan’s new film is likely to polarize audiences who regard him as a genius or see him as a breezy forgery, but he managed to move me, perhaps not as much as he did 15 years ago, when his ambitions were more intimate, but enough to leave the room with the satisfaction of hearing things, A lot of things. I hope it happens to you too.

Note: 7

The best: Again, Shyamalan tricks us into telling a heartwarming story after spending an hour and a half in grueling tension.

Worse: Some of the cast are over the top like Mark Wahlberg talking to plants in “The Incident.”