Deadline reports that Ben Aldridge (Pennyworth) and Jonathan Groff (The Matrix Resurrections) have signed on to join previously announced cast members Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy), Rupert Grint (Servant), and Nikki Amuka-Bird (Old) in writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan‘s new thriller Knock at the Cabin. Character details are being kept under wraps. So are plot details. All we really know about Knock at the Cabin is that Universal has it scheduled for a February 3, 2023 theatrical release.
Our friends over at Bloody Disgusting have heard that Knock at the Cabin is “a home invasion horror film that takes place during the apocalypse.” Their source even compared the story to the Paul Tremblay novel The Cabin at the End of the World. Could this be a Shyamalan-ized (Shyamalized?) adaptation of the Tremblay novel, like Old was an adaptation of the graphic novel Sandcastle?
Copies of Tremblay’s novel can be purchased at THIS LINK. Here’s the description:
Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road.
One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.”
Thus begins an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion, one in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined. The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay.
It does mention a character who is “the largest man Wen has ever seen”, and Shyamalan said he needed a “giant human being” to play the character he cast Bautista as. We’ll have to wait and see just how similar Knock at the Cabin ends up being to The Cabin at the End of the World.