Knock At The Cabin (R21)

100 minutes, opens on Thursday

3 stars

The story: A gay couple (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge) on vacation with their seven-year-old daughter (Kristen Cui) in a woodlands cabin are held captive by four armed strangers, who demand the family sacrifice one of their own as mankind’s only hope to avert an apocalypse.

Are the intruders in Knock At The Cabin delusional? Are they true messengers of God? One never knows when the director is M. Night Shyamalan, the Hollywood trickster behind the shock twists in The Sixth Sense (1999) and Signs (2002).

Shyamalan has outgrown such stunts while continuing his career-long theme of faith in this home invasion thriller based on the 2018 Paul Tremblay bestseller, The Cabin At The End Of The World.

The maybe-prophets do seem sincere. Dave Bautista is the star performer as a gentle giant schoolteacher, and his “associates” – the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – are a nurse (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a cook (Abby Quinn) and an ex-con (Rupert Grint).

Shyamalan’s film-making craft is nonpareil, the way he manipulates his off-kilter camera for sinister tension among his seven characters in a confined setting.

But despite an arresting hook, the story stalls as the two dads agonise over their conundrum. There are unhappy flashbacks to their homophobic encounters, as well as background news broadcasts of plagues and environmental destruction.

Why should they sacrifice their family to save a humanity undeserving of saving?

Shyamalan himself comes up with no satisfying answers after changing the book’s conclusion. Whatever the fate of the world, his modern-day biblical parable ends with an anti-climactic whimper.

Hot take: Shyamalan is a master storyteller even when the story goes nowhere and despite a confounding title missing a word (what happened to “door”?).

Close (PG13)

105 minutes, opens on Thursday exclusively at The Projector

4 stars

The story: The seemingly unbreakable bond between two 13-year-old boys (Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele) tragically ruptures in this 2022 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner, which is also a current Academy Award nominee for best international film.

How serendipitous that Belgian film-maker Lukas Dhont discovered Dambrine on a train journey. Both the first-time actor and De Waele are heartbreaking in their emotional purity, co-starring in Close as best friends Leo and Remi respectively.

For the inseparable pair, summer in the Flemish countryside is an idyll of laughing, frolicking amid the peony fields of Leo’s family farm and snuggly sleepovers.

Then comes the new school year, and they are teased by classmates asking if they are a couple. Leo becomes self-conscious. He begins to distance himself, leaving Remi hurt and bewildered, as he takes up ice hockey with other boys to fit in.

Dhont’s previous film Girl (2018), about a trans ballerina, was another Cannes award winner – a Camera d’Or, for best first feature – that critiqued the way identity is defined by gender and sexuality.

This reckoning spells the loss of innocence for Leo, and in the aftermath of a devastating incident mid-story, he struggles with grief, guilt and myriad inexpressible feelings – questions about intimacy, masculinity, social norms – he cannot yet understand.

It is okay because Dhont gets it. The writer-director articulates with precision and empathy that fragile moment between childhood and adolescence.

Hot take: This coming-of-age tale is like a boyhood edition of The Banshees Of Inisherin (2023) minus the humour and crushingly sad.