What should I call him? M? Mr M? Night? The Shyminator? Hovering marketing types are vague and evasive: capable of loading a Wikipedia page, I discover the director’s real name is Manoj — should I try that? Better perhaps to go to the source, ask the man himself.
“Oh it’s Night,” he says quietly — it’s a nickname he picked up at college and rather liked the sound of. And when he broke through in the late 1990s, it certainly made his name more distinctive. During that first iteration, films like The Sixth Sense, Signs and Unbreakable made hay at the box office and led critics to compare Shyamalan to Hitchcock. Then, a career crash, as the critical failure of The Last Airbender and The Happening knocked him off his perch.
Forced to reinvent himself, he has done so in style, and two of his recent films, The Visit and Old, are as good as anything he’s done. Now comes Knock at the Cabin, a pared back and rather chilling thriller set in a remote holiday home. Gay couple Andrew and Eric (Ben Aldridge, Jonathan Groff) and their eight-year-old daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) have rented a cabin by the lake when a group of strangers storm the house.
Their leader, Leonard (Dave Bautista), is a tattooed giant but speaks softly, and insists that they don’t want to hurt them. Instead, Leonard outlines a strange proposal: the apocalypse is coming, and mankind can only be saved if one of the family agrees to sacrifice themselves. Are these strange invaders mad, or might they be telling the truth?
Bautista’s casting was daring, and he’s excellent in an unlikely role. Was it a risk? “For me there was really only one person who could have played Leonard in the world,” the director explains, “and if Dave didn’t exist, I would have had to think of it entirely differently. As written, there was only one person.”
In a strikingly vivid opening sequence, Leonard appears through the woods while Wen is catching crickets, and hints regretfully at what lies ahead. Shyamalan was drawn by the contradictions in that scene. “You know, the idea that this little girl is having a conversation with this giant who we are worried about for obvious reasons, a man who seems to be talking to a little girl inappropriately, but yet we start to see, and so does she, that he’s incredibly pure in some sense. And yet, beyond that, there’s something he’s not telling her, which is making us uneasy for a different reason.”
Indeed it is. Rupert Grint, Abby Quinn and Nikki Amuka-Bird play the other three invaders, who arrive lugging fearsome industrial-looking weapons but all speak gently, and with evident regret. Their story about an impending biblical apocalypse seems absurd, but news reports glimpsed on the television suggest they might be on to something. In Paul G Tremblay’s original novel, we never really find out if they’re telling the truth or not, but M Night was having none of that.
“The thing that drew me to the book in the first place was the set up,” he says, “and this compelling emotional premise that I have to see through, all the way to the end. And why I departed from the book so much was because I felt that that didn’t happen there. It’s a jury movie, and so I need to hear a verdict. I didn’t care either way, I just needed to hear a verdict, because in a way it’s a supernatural Sophie’s Choice. And you don’t get to have Sophie not make a choice.”
Distinctive: M Night Shyamalan, director of Knock at the Cabin. Photo by Eugene Gologursky via Getty Images
The interplay between the actors is intense, and sometimes the drama feels like a play. “We rehearsed a lot. My feeling was that I wanted to get everyone close to where I wanted them to be on the day we shot each scene. I’m very open with the actors if they want to know how I’m going to shoot it.
“I put up the entire movie as a storyboard, the whole thing, every single shot, and so the rehearsal process is a little bit of teaching choreography as well. It’s like this dance of emotion, but you have to block it in advance.”
Without giving too much away, bad things happen in that cabin, but Shyamalan is careful to shield his audience from any violent excesses. “It’s Tabasco sauce, isn’t it, so you want to trust the balance of the flavours of the piece, and you just want a touch of it, because too much will shut people down in a way that I need them open emotionally for the things that they’re gonna feel.
“There’s a line in between torture porn or torture horror,” he says, “which isn’t film-making you know, you go too far. Like if you make a movie about a woman being raped, yes you have our attention, but that’s not film-making.”
Shyamalan is passionate about cinema, and always has been. I ask him if he’s seen Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama The Fabelmans, and point out that the kid with the Super 8 camera in it could just as easily have been him: by the time he was 17, Shyamalan had made 45 home movies.
“Definitely,” he says, nodding, “and all because of him. Yeah, so it was like John Ford to Spielberg. You know, he’s everything to me, and you mimic your hero as a child. But no matter who inspires you, when you’re doing it correctly, you’re doing it very differently.”
Apart from Spielberg, which film-makers influenced him growing up? “Well it was kind of two iterations I think. The initial ignition of the magic of cinema for me was from George Lucas and Steven obviously, because I was seven, eight, nine, 10, watching all those great films. And then the next iteration, when I was like 16 to 21 or 22, was when I started to realise that I wanted to do this as a living. Then I started to watch movies that might help me with that, and in that era it became the Hitchcocks and the Kubricks and the Kurosawas. There are many, many others, but when we talk about those three in particular, the thing that I really relate to is the formality of their frames, the stillness and the composition, the tension that comes from that.”
Shyamalan was still in his 20s when he wrote and directed The Sixth Sense, a clever chiller starring Bruce Willis as a child psychologist who becomes convinced that one of his patients is communicating with the dead. Despite being a horror film, it had all the sweep and composure of a classic Hollywood melodrama, and grossed almost $700m. His 2002 science fiction film Signs did almost as well, and for a time Night was the new Hitchcock, the thriller maker with the midas touch. Then came the backlash.
When I ask him about his mid-career slump, and how he responded to it, he politely corrects me. “Yeah, well look, everything is a narrative, even the way you think about it is a narrative, that I could sit there and debunk.” He has a point: The Happening (2008) and The Last Airbender (2009), his two most widely derided films, still turned a handsome profit. Shyamalan never lost his box office mojo, but after those two movies, the critics had it in for him, and financing was hard to find.
“My particular feeling on it, being older and having done this for 30 years, is that there were two distinct things at play: one is my relationship to the art form, and the other is my relationship to the outer world, and obviously the most precious thing of all is my relationship to the art form.
“So the thing is, you should never forget why you do it, and never let anything corrupt that. Because that’s the thing that will make you happy, that’s the thing that you consider sacred, so you try and make your life the purest version of that. And so it was trying to relate to the world, to the media, the industry, all that stuff, that caused me to realise the first thing, and I went, you know, all that matters is this. And I thought, now I know how to do this again, so I took out a mortgage and made The Visit.”
That film, made for just $5m, is probably my favourite Shyamalan film of all, an unsettling found-footage tale of two resourceful teenagers who are sent to stay with her mother’s parents, whom they’ve never met, and slowly realise that something is terribly amiss.
“After that,” he says, “I was like wow, this is all that matters, and then a realisation that, like, let the noise do whatever, and whoever wants to see me do this thing, that will be enough.”
Since then he’s finished his twisted superhero trilogy Unbreakable, and made Old, a terrific slice of guignol about entitled holidaymakers who find themselves trapped on a beach that rapidly speeds up the ageing process.
“You find these ways,” he tells me with a smile, “to tap into our deepest fears. But when I think about how impossible it is to make a movie, with all these different moving parts, when it does come together it always feels like something almost divine.”
And Night has passed his passion on to his daughters: Saleka is an R&B singer/songwriter, while Ishana Shyamalan is a budding film-maker.
“She’s coming to Dublin next year,” he tells me, “to make her first feature. She’ll be there for months, so I’ll be coming back and forth. I’ve only been to Dublin once, but I absolutely loved it, and I’ve told her how much it meant to me.” Expect to see numerous Shyamalans wandering the capital in 2024.
