There’s another M. Night Shyamalan horror movie out, an unpleasant little effort called Knock at the Cabin. It’s another one of his low-budget, self-financed films that he’s been making since 2015, including The Visit (2015), Split (2016), Glass (2019), and Old (2021). And though I liked aspects of The Visit, his new movies just make me wonder how he ever pulled off his big career-making hit The Sixth Sense (1999) all those years ago.

Shyamalan says he makes low-budget films now because that way he can keep total creative control. It seems Shyamalan learned nothing from the notoriously awful Lady in the Water (2006), during which he would brook no interference and had his own way in everything and created a monstrously unwatchable mess with no one to blame but himself.

Knock at the Cabin isn’t that bad, but it’s half-baked and awkward and unconvincing in a way that proves, if it really needed proving, that not everyone can be an auteur just because they consider themselves auteurs. Take the title, for starters. It’s not good. I can never remember it and keep automatically trying to fix it by calling it Knock on the Cabin Door, which still isn’t good, but at least it doesn’t sound like a strangely unfinished title, as if the person writing it had been shot before finishing.