Shyamalan and his co-writers talk about why they changed Knock At The Cabin's ending - The A.V. Club

From The Sixth Sense onward, Shyamalan has favored, for decades now, a storytelling style wherein the last few minutes of his movies serve as a key to unlocking a fuller understanding of all the ones that came before.

And while the general merits of all that preceding filmmaking render accusations that he’s not much more than a glorified twist merchant unfair, it’s also been a persistent aspect of his style, one he’s steered into quite happily as the years have gone on.

Which makes it fascinating to hear ( via an interview with Variety, conducted at the film’s premiere) Shyamalan and his writers talk about the director’s latest effort, Knock At The Cabin, in terms of its ending—especially since one of the first things the director and his cohorts did when adapting Paul Tremblay’s book The Cabin At The End Of The World(a rare instance of Shyamalan not working from an original story) was jettison Tremblay’s ending in favor of a new one.

Here’s Desmond and Sherman, talking about why they and Shyamalan ditched Tremblay’s ending in favor of one where Wen survives, with one of her fathers eventually giving his life to apparently save the world (and with the apocalypse itself much less ambiguously rendered):

(Interestingly, Tremblay suggests that his own ending is the less depressing one, since it leaves the situation ambiguous, rather than positing a universe where God or whoever absolutely pulls this kind of manipulative shit on his creations: “I find it horrific there’s this higher power that is just going to willy-nilly sacrifice humans for everybody else.”)

As for Shyamalan himself, he argues that his film walks the line between optimistic and nihilistic: “The most important thing at the end is that everybody puts themselves in the characters’ shoes.