Like with M. Night Shyamalan’s last film Old, the premise here is the kind of high-concept story that wouldn’t look out of place in an SF anthology series like The Twilight Zone. While vacationing in a remote cabin in the woods, couple Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) along with their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) receive the titular Knock from four strangers (Dave Bautista, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn, and Rupert Grint). Under the impression that the world is about to end, they tell the couple that there is only one chance to avert the apocalypse: One of the family has to die, and it has to be by a loved one’s hand.
Building off the many, many extreme close-up shots in Jarin Blaschke and Lowell A. Meyer’s cinematography, the film feels as much of an empathy check for the audience as it does for the characters in the frame. As the screen is filled to bursting with the faces of people who are asking, pleading, for the lives of the entire human race as well as their own, it confronts the audience with a simple but crushing question: Would you be able to look them in the eye and say “I will let you die”, if the alternative was killing someone in your own family? In that sense, it’s an attempt to connect proximal empathy, connecting people to those right in front of them, to a more abstract empathy to do with those who you aren’t necessarily looking directly in the face, but for whom your actions still carry weight and consequence.
Of course, if the main family in question had any real amount of dysfunction to them, this kind of moral dilemma could’ve been kneecapped right from the start. “I get to off my abusive partner and save the world? Where’s my shotgun?”
Good thing, then, that Shyamalan is such a sentimental dude that he would set a love story in the middle of a global suicide event (as he did in The Happening), and as such, the love between Eric, Andrew, and Wen is literally described in-film as pure. Instead, the real conflict comes from two other areas: Scepticism over whether what these four randos are saying is true, and Andrew’s conflicting ideals concerning the worthiness of the human race.
The former
almost feels like an afterthought, since this contains what is easily
one of the softest ‘twists’ in Shyamalan’s entire filmography, to the point
where it barely even feels like one to begin with. It makes some attempt
to show ambiguity about the stakes of the plot, but it never ends up holding
much water. But with the latter, Ben Aldridge (fresh off his turn in another
pure Gay romance with Spoiler Alert) imbues his character, a human rights
lawyer with a dour perspective on humanity, with the right amount of realism to
make it stick. Considering that perspective is influenced by his traumatic involvement in a hate crime, this very easily could have devolved into
a backhanded attempt at Gay solidarity (“stop playing the victim”, that kind of
shit), but it instead links up with that emphasis on empathy to highlight that…
well, it’s tempting to write off the world as cold and uncaring, when that’s
how it has treated you up to that point.
But that’s the ultimate point of this whole thing: It’s bigger than any one of us. Our collective survival is just that: Collective. We need awareness of how our actions affect everyone else, no matter how much we may try and isolate ourselves. While it’s tempting to view this as a potential commentary on the whole ‘they must be sacrificed’ mentality that floated around during the peak of COVID-19 or (perhaps more sensibly) sentiments regarding climate change, this film works best as a point-blank plea for empathy in all things. Every character here treats that core conceit, of asking someone else to make a terrible but necessary choice, with an acknowledgement of just how big of an ask that is for anyone, and thus makes it a point to bring that abstract point right into flesh-and-blood reality. Existing as I do within this space, where a lack of connection to a physical face can make the merit of words like these much, much tougher to get through, this feels particularly vital as an idea to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment