Knock at the Cabin (2023) * * *

Directed by:  M. Night Shyamalan

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

Knock at the Cabin tells a chilling story simply and effectively.   Four ordinary people descend on a vacation cabin somewhere in a remote Pennsylvania forest.   These people explain they are haunted by visions of an imminent apocalypse.  Its leader Leonard (Bautista), a Chicago schoolteacher, befriends a little girl named Wen (Cui), who collects grasshoppers in a jar and is blissfully unaware of why Leonard and his friends are there.   The eerie foursome, after breaking into the cabin, lay out what Wen and her fathers Eric and Andrew (Groff and Aldridge) must do in order to avert the pending apocalypse: Eric and Andrew must sacrifice one of their family in order to stop the planet's population from being obliterated.   

The ground rules are as follows:   Neither Leonard or the other three home invaders, Redmond (Grint), Adriane (Quinn), and Sabrina (Amuka-Bird) cannot kill any of the family members and the more time elapses without a decision, more catastrophes killing millions will occur.   Eric and Andrew understandably presume Leonard and his followers to be insane or lying, but unlike many home invaders, Leonard and the others are haunted and tormented by what they've seen and what they must do.   "My heart is broken," Leonard tells Wen, and we believe him.   Eric and Andrew aren't the only ones who are put in a no-win position with this scenario.

Based on a novel, M. Night Shyamalan doesn't do the story a disservice with a trick ending or odd explanations of this frightening circumstance.   The Bautista performance is the best in the movie and the best of his career so far.   Leonard is a bespectacled hulk with tenderness and sympathy for the family for which he must force this ultimatum.   We find we identify with him as much as we do Eric and Andrew.  In every way, all of Knock at the Cabin's characters are forced to make a choice which they never thought in their wildest dreams would ever have to be made.  Who could ever imagine being told he or she has to kill a loved one in order to spare the rest of the world's population from extinction?   Knock at the Cabin deserves recognition for not only presenting this nightmarish sequence but by following cold logic to its inevitable conclusion with no way around the outcome.