How to stop the end of the world

   

  M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin is based on a Paul G. Tremblay novel entitled The Cabin at the End of the World. Shyamalan's awkward transformation of Tremblay's title indicates what goes wrong with a potentially interesting movie.

   Not content to allow the audience to draw its own conclusions -- as the novel did -- Shyamalan steeps the story's conclusion in the kind of face-value thinking that undermines the screenplay’s stabs at ambiguity.

  Knock at the Cabin centers on two gay dads (Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff) who have taken their adopted Chinese daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) on vacation to a cabin in Pennsylvania.

    If an isolated setting in the woods didn't already signal trouble to anyone who has ever seen a movie, Herdis Stefansdottir's groaning score further tips Shyamalan's hand: A horror scenario involving home invasion will be flavored with quasi-religious suggestion.  

   It doesn't take long for four strangers to force their way into the cabin, carrying ominous looking homemade tools that bear little resemblance to anything available at a local hardware store. 

    Shyamalan gives us a modern version of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, harbingers of punishing global judgment: Dave Bautista's Leonard, Nikki Amuka-Bird's Sabrina, Rupert Grint's Redmond, and Abby Quinn's Adriane.

    A massive hulk of a man, Bautista's Leonard emerges as the stand-out character. In an early scene that's both lyrical and creepy, Leonard meets Wen. We wonder whether he might be the screen's latest serial killer.

   Instead, Leonard turns out to be a bespectacled second-grade teacher who speaks with alarming sincerity about his "mission." 

    He insists that he and his cohorts have had visions. They've been instructed to find this particular cabin so that global catastrophe can be averted. Only one act will stave off devastation. One of the family members must be killed by the others. 

    Are we watching a hoax perpetrated by four brainwashed strangers who we’re told met on-line or is this the real deal, the last days of humanity? 

    The home invaders have convinced themselves that their visions are real. They don't like what they've been sent to do but insist they have no choice. They implore the two dads to take action. When the dads refuse, the invaders kill one of their number and the global devastation begins.

    Leonard turns on the TV, and Shyamalan shows snippets of apocalyptic destruction. Tsunamis vanquish Hawaii. Planes fall from the sky.  

    Putting a child in danger and using the prospect of human sacrifice to drive the plot give the movie a warped undertow that's as distasteful as it is unnerving. For the most of the movie, the two dads remain tied to chairs.

     If a drama such as this is to work, we probably should be encouraged to ask ourselves what we’d do if faced with such a terrible choice. That level of involvement would have required a sense of identification Knock at the Cabin seldom delivers.

   Shyamalan creates tension as the dads try to find a way out of a horrible situation. But watching characters we hardly know struggle their way through the movie's reductive moral dilemma doesn't make it easy for us to find a way in.

‘Persuasion:’ A modern gloss doesn’t help

    If Jane Austen had been given to scribbling on the back of napkins, someone probably would have been tempted to try a film adaptation. It's not difficult to understand why. 

   Austen's novels tend to be smart and accessible. They include socially incisive viewpoints and beatifully drawn characters. 

  And if you mistakenly stick to the surface, Austen's work may not seem particularly challenging.

  Persuasion, Austen's last novel, already had been made into a BBC movie by director Roger Michell, whose adaptation was released in 1997. A decade later, director Adrian Shergold directed a TV movie version starring Sally Hawkins.

   Now, theater director Carrie Cracknell, working from a screenplay by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, tries to give Austen's novel a contemporary gloss by infusing the story with anachronistic dialogue and a sensibility that's meant to be comic -- or at least cheeky. It comes off as an overdone attempt to engage audiences who may have grown weary of period work.

    Many of the attempts to nail contemporary flavor are ill-advised, jarring, and juvenile. At one point, it's noted that a five in London might earn a 10 in less-sophisticated Bath. 

   Casting Dakota Johnson in the principal role of Anne Elliott, Cracknell sends the movie spiraling into a hollow middle ground where it fails to work either as a spirited goof or a heartbreaking look at a young woman who loses the love of her life when she follows social dictates.

   Not only does Johnson occasionally talk directly to the camera but she lights few sparks with a dour Cosmo Jarvis, who plays Frederick Wentworth, a naval officer whose status was deemed too low for Anne to consider as a husband.

   The supporting cast includes Richard E. Grant as Anne's preposterously vain father, Mia McKenna-Bruce as Anne's  self-centered half-sister, and Henry Golding, as a smug peacock of a fellow who flirts with Anne. As a cousin, he's also in line to acquire the family estate and the titles that go with it, women being ineligible to inherit property.

   Nikki Amuka-Bird portrays Anne's godmother Lady Russell, a woman who indulges in sex when she travels around Europe but is largely responsible for Anne's ill-advised rejection of Wentworth.

  Johnson remains an appealing actress. Her English accent is passable. But does she capture Anne's painful solitude or her unquenchable longing? Not really. 

    The whole enterprise comes off as an attempt to ... well ... I'm not sure what. Austen probably isn't turning over in her grave but she might watch this adaptation with a sense of troubled bemusement, a response no Austen novel deserves.

‘Old’ clould have used some new tricks

      Imagine if you aged 50 years in a single day.

      Or -- on second thought -- don't bother because if you buy into M. Night Shyamalan's Old, you'll be taking a trip that's often more ludicrous than scary, mind-expanding or (heaven forbid) insightful.

     The movie begins when a family arrives at a tropical paradise, an upscale resort with a genial manager and all the amenities anyone could want. 

    Mom (Vicky Krieps) found the place online. Her husband (Gael Garcia Bernal) seems wary, but the two children -- a six-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter -- are primed for fun in the sun. 

    Well, sort of. We quickly learn that Mom and Dad are keeping a secret about Mom’s health from the kids.

    On the morning after their arrival, the hotel's manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) suggests the family visit a beautiful beach, a secluded spot he recommends only to special guests.

    The vacationers are driven to the beach along with another couple and their daughter. Before long, a couple of additional beachgoers arrive, rounding out a cast that includes Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Aaron Pierre.

    Once at the beach, the characters begin a mysterious aging process that baffles and unnerves them. Don’t blame lack of sunblock.

     Those who try to escape immediately black out only to reawaken on the beach, trapped again in a rapid-aging nightmare by a steep cliff wall that makes the beach mostly inaccessible.

    Shyamalan employs make-up and adds new cast members to create the aging process, which includes episodes in which Sewell's character,  a surgeon, steadily loses his grip.  A girl becomes pregnant after starting the movie as a pre-schooler. The bones of a vain woman (Abbey Lee) calcify, turning her body into a mangled heap. 

     More cliched than perceptive, the movie has little to say aging, a topic that might given the movie real weight.

    None of the performances are notable, and I stopped trying to keep track of the cast other than to note that Alex Wolff has a somewhat extended turn as the boy of the early scenes at age 15. 

    Enough. Shyamalan has a hit-and-miss track record that includes movies such as Glass, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, and of course, The Sixth Sense. 

   Less mystique-oriented than some of Shyamalan's work, Old makes a lame attempt at social relevance, basing its screenplay on  Sandcastle, a graphic novel written by Pierre-Oscar-Levy and Frederick Peters.

     Not to disappoint his fans, Shyamalan gives Old one of his signature twists, a  big late-picture reveal that's easy enough to predict and which falls flat.  

     The finale strives for moral complexity but proves as unconvincing as the rest of a movie that already has drowned  in shallow thematic waters.