Knock at the Cabin + 12 Angry Men

• Wednesday, August 27 at 6:30pm (Knock at the Cabin) + 8:45pm (12 Angry Men)
• Sunday, August 31 at 1:00pm (Knock at the Cabin) + 3:00pm (12 Angry Men)

Knock at the Cabin
M. Night Shyamalan, 2023, U.S., 108m
M. Night Shyamalan’s chambered morality play distills cosmic stakes into an impossible proposition when a young girl and her parents find their remote vacation interrupted by four strangers who calmly insist that one of them must be willingly sacrificed to prevent the apocalypse. Nearly the entire film unfolds within a single cabin, where Shyamalan leans into spatial and formal constraint, staging violence just out of frame and allowing dread to accumulate in the faces of his actors. Dave Bautista gives a quietly mesmerizing performance as Leonard—a hulking figure whose soft-spoken gentleness only heightens the unease—joined by a scruffily unnerving Rupert Grint and wrenching turns from Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff as the parents. A loose adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World (2018).

Followed by:

12 Angry Men
Sidney Lumet, 1957, U.S., 35mm, 96m
Following closing arguments in a capital murder trial, 12 jurors—all men, all strangers—retreat to a sweltering deliberation room to determine the fate of a teenage boy. A guilty verdict means death. Eleven are ready to convict—until one juror (Henry Fonda, also the film’s producer) raises quiet, persistent doubts. As tempers flare and the clock ticks, the group is forced to reckon not just with the facts of the case, but with their own assumptions, biases, and buried grievances. Adapted from Reginald Rose’s teleplay, Sidney Lumet’s blistering debut feature transforms civic duty into a pressure cooker of ideological tension. It remains, nearly 70 years later, a master class in confined-space suspense and superbly performed drama.