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
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.
