I tried reading Cabin at the End of the World, the novel in which this movie was based on. I wasn’t a big fan of the writing and didn’t make it to the end of the book. So, my expectations weren’t all that high coming into this movie, although I do usually enjoy watching M Night Shamyalan movies. What I wound up watching was a movie that had a very interesting premise that worked at certain levels but wasn’t executed as well as it could have been. In other words, it was a good but not a great movie.
As I mentioned, the premise which the movie operates from is pretty fascinating. A group of strangers break into the house of a family with a cabin in the remote recesses of the wood and explain to them that they have to voluntarily kill one of their family members in order to stave off the apocalypse, and it made me wonder how I would handle things if I were in the shoes of this family. There was good mystery and tension about what these intruders initially wanted and if they were hostile. One of the issues I had with the movie was predictability. It wasn’t too difficult to tell just what people were going to die and what decisions were going to be made at the end of it. I thought the acting was quite good, especially Dave Bautista, who played a very different kind of character than I have seen from him in the past. Also, I liked the fact that the movie provided a definitive conclusion, whereas the book apparently doesn’t.
In all, although I did love this movie, it was fun to watch and I would recommend it.