Spoiler Alert: Character Arcs and Functionality in Knock at the Cabin

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan 

Written by M. Night Shyamalan 

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

Release Date February 3rd, 2023 

Published February 3rd, 2023 

Knock at the Cabin is a horror thriller about the apocalypse. Four characters, played by Dave Bautista, Abby Quinn, Rupert Grint, and Nikki Amuka Bird, travel to a cabin in Pennsylvania where they hope to avert a worldwide apocalypse. To do this, they must convince a family of three, played by Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge and their daughter played by Kristin Cui, to willing sacrifice one member of their family. The four visitors have had a shared vision of the future and received a vague prophecy related to this specific cabin and whoever lives there. 

In this article we are going to examine the character arcs and how they function in M. Night Shyamalan's nightmare fantasy of the end of the world. To do that, there will be spoilers. If you are wanting to see Knock at the Cabin, you should see the movie first and then come back and engage with this article. 

Leonard - Played by Dave Bautista, over the course of Knock at the Cabin we learn that Leonard is a schoolteacher and that he coaches middle school sports. Leonard is big and imposing but has a gentle quality as he demonstrates upon meeting Wen, the young daughter of Eric and Andrew. As he joins Wen to catch Grasshoppers for a school project, Leonard gently works to make Wen comfortable before he is compelled to reveal why he has come to this mostly empty stretch of Pennsylvania forest. 

Leonard is the de-facto leader of the four people who come to the cabin. It's Leonard who reveals the prophecy and the details of the apocalypse and that each of his fellow visitors will die until Eric and Andrew make a decision about which of them should die to save humanity. And that's pretty much it. Leonard appears wise and Dave Bautista invests him with a particular passion that is very compelling but, he doesn't change much as we see him. The biggest change in Leonard's life happens entirely off-screen. 

By the time that Leonard has arrived at the cabin, he's a devotee of this apocalypse plan and doesn't waver. Perhaps his arc is coming to accept his own fate, dying by his own hand, but again, it's not an arc. Instead of having an arc where he starts at one point of an emotional or physical journey, Leonard is a functional character. Leonard exists to motivate change in Eric and Andrew. I am not saying this as a negative critique, I'm just establishing how he functions in this story. 

Abby - Abby is a line cook and a mother of a son named Charlie. She enjoys cooking and likes making people happy. Like Leonard, the biggest arc of her life happened off screen. Finding Leonard and the rest via a message board and going to Pennsylvania to carry out their role in trying to prevent the apocalypse, happens before we meet Abby. What we see of Abby is that she is manic, anxious, and a little panicked. And that never changes until her character is killed to set off another plague of the apocalypse. Like Leonard, she functions as a motivator for Andrew and Eric. 

Sabrina - Sabrina is a nurse and a supremely kind woman. Though she uses a weapon to break into the cabin in violent fashion, when Eric is injured during the home invasion, Sabrina tends to him and cares for him. She goes out of her way to make Eric comfortable as he has suffered a concussion during the brawl. It's likely just how she was as a nurse, a caring, loving presence. Like her fellow visitors, her arc happened offscreen as she went from a full time nurse with a family to someone who drove 6 hours to be at this place, at this time, to try and stop the apocalypse. Her death doesn't go as planned but she seems prepared to accept it when it comes. 

Redmond - Redmond is the last of our foursome and the only one who gets a scene outside of the main narrative. Redmond is belligerent and agitated but that's explained by the fact that he knows he's the first to die if Andrew and Eric fail to make a choice. It will come about through the arguing back and forth between Eric and Leonard, that Redmond knew Eric and Andrew before coming to the cabin. As Eric recalls, Redmond approached him and Andrew at a bar in Boston and assaulted Eric with a beer bottle after having overheard the two men professing their love to each other. 

Find my full length Spoiler Alert Article at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review: The Radium Girls

The Radium Girls (2018)

Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher

Written by Ginny Mohler, Brittany Shaw 

Starring Joey King, Abby Quinn, Cara Seymour, Susan Heyward

Release Date October 23rd, 2020

Published October 25th, 2020 

Unbridled capitalism is a lovely idea but in practice, you get a story like that which is told in the new movie, The Radium Girls. If you aren’t familiar with the story of The Radium Girls, it’s a horror story about the lengths that some will go to protect profits. The company American Radium was willing to sacrifice the lives and health of poor female workers just to protect a few million dollars. It’s a story of monstrous greed and a company that abandoned basic humanity and decency in favor of money. 

Joey King stars in The Radium Girls as Bessie, the youngest of three sisters, all of whom have worked for American Radium. The oldest sister, Mary, passed away three years prior to this story. Her death was deemed to have been due to syphilis. Now, middle sister, Josephine (Abby Quinn) has fallen ill with similar symptoms to Mary. When a doctor, working on behalf of American Radium, diagnoses Josephine with Syphilis, the sisters realize that the company is lying and trying to cover something up. Josephine is a virgin, so an aggressive STD is not causing her illness. 

At the recommendation of Walt (Colin Kelly-Sordelet), a young man that Bessie has met and fallen for, the sisters meet with the New Jersey Consumer League, headed up by Wiley Stephens (Cara Seymour) who informs them that she’s received complaints about American Radium before. Stephens convinces the sisters to see a new doctor and to take the drastic step of exhuming Mary’s body so that her actual cause of death can be determined. When Mary’s grave is opened, her bones are so radioactive that they glow in the dark. 

While working at American Radium, the sisters worked as dial painters. Their job was to paint the numbers on a watch with a radium based paint so that the numbers glowed in the dark. To get the finest point on their brushes, the girls were instructed by the company to lick the tip of their brushes. At one point in American history, after the discovery of radium, actual campaigns pushed radium as an elixir and bottled it for sale as a drink. 

That was before it became clear what Radium was doing to the people that consumed it. We will come to find out that American Radium knew, well before the death of Bessie and Josephine’s sister, that consuming radium was deadly. The company conducted their own study of radium exposure and when the results came back and showed how deadly radium was, the company buried their own study and kept instructing the workers to lick the tip of the brush. 

What American Radium did is unconscionable. It’s monstrous and, as Joey King’s Bessie states in The Radium Girls, they should have been tried for murder. The company willfully facilitated the deaths of its employees because glow in the dark clock faces became a multi-million dollar market. The company buried their own scientists, literally as the movie shows, in order to cover up what they did to their workers. 

I was once a strict capitalist. I believed that market pressure would be enough to get companies to act in the best interests of the public and their employees. Then, I read the story of The Radium Girls in college and I lost my taste for unfettered capitalism. I simply cannot abide what American Radium did to desperate, poor women in the name of capitalism. Now, I am certainly not a communist but unlike a lot of people I can be critical of capitalism and still believe in it. 

The Radium Girls were a flashpoint that led to the creation of unions and federal regulations that gave unions the teeth to deal with corporate exploitation for profit. In the last three decades however, as unions were consumed by their own greed and workers rights have become a passé issue among the political elite, we appear to be heading toward another flashpoint. As billionaires get richer and richer, their exploitative practices that risk the lives of their employees and customers alike, get more extreme. 

We need stories like The Radium Girls to be told as a cautionary tale. People need to be reminded that when we aren’t vigilant about worker’s rights and working conditions, companies will willfully exploit our ignorance. The actual movie is a tad on the rudimentary side. It’s not a special movie from a technical standpoint. That said, the movie has tremendous value as a polemic and an example. With what we are still learning about the way modern corporations have intentionally crushed unions and ignored environmental concerns, movies like The Radium Girls should be a flashpoint for remembering the need to keep a check on the powerful.