I’ll spoil it up front: the twist is that you’re in a Michael Haneke movie but it was written by a retard.

Okay, that’s harsh. It’s not a bad movie, in that the internal logic is mostly consistent, it has the advantage of being brisk, and Dave Bautista can actually act. In fact it might even kind of be interesting, depending on your priors going in, although there is no world in which it is good. The trailer is the two minute synopsis of Act I – Dave Bautista and three disposables take the Wen Lee Has Two Daddies family hostage while they’re vacationing at the titular cabin and demand they choose one of their family to murder, in order to forestall the end of the world.

(As you get older and busier, you appreciate more and more a movie that doesn’t do the Tom Hanks bit of wasting Act I e s t a b l i s h i n g that the protagonists are good family men. Audiences are willing to credit you with that much going in; save the boring shit for interspersed flashbacks so people can take bathroom breaks. Admirable direction!)

Now structurally, there are only two ways this can go, unless you’ve got some excellent writing (“I will tell you this: strangely, it was the fastest script I’ve ever written” – M Night Shyamalan). Either they’re lying, and this is a puzzle movie where you’re trying to figure out how they pulled it off and rooting for the protagonists as they try to escape, or they’re telling the truth and you’re basically just along for the ride as you’re convinced in parallel with the protagonists. It’s kind of obvious which one we’re going to go with here, because it’s the efficiency play for an “unexpected” twist that nonetheless requires an absolute minimum of orchestration.

The way to analyze this kind of movie is “in what kind of a universe would this not be dumb, and is that an interesting universe to be in”. At first glance, it’s dumb! The explanation of the cultists is that they’ve all had the same visions, they met each other on a message board by virtue of having those same visions, and then followed them to this cabin. Okay, arguendo, this is internally convincing to the cultists themselves, but people engage in all sorts of folie a deux online they are internally convinced by. In order for this to be externally convincing to a non participant, like the protagonists or the audience, you need some sort of external source of truth that corroborates what these people are saying. It comes via the TV repeatedly confirming that yep, we got disasters happening.

Now, in combination with the aesthetic of the movie, I think we start to see the one interesting note – this is, I think unintentionally, a COVID cult movie. It’s shot like a “COVID movie”, in the sense of a movie made under severe restrictions of cast, crew, locations, and sets (without brand-name personnel costs, this is the kind of thing you can film for zero dollars in an Airbnb over the course of a week). The “disaster” they’re trying to stop has eerie echoes of COVID – along with the earthquakes and weather, there’s outbreaks of some novel flu in England, South Africa, and the US, “particularly deadly to children under ten”. The protagonists are holed up in a cabin of the type so many of their class scampered off to in 2020, receive all news of the outside via disaster porn on the television, and aren’t allowed to leave.

More to the point, the cultists’ desired response is that the targets start sacrificing their family. These are the same people who in 2020 kept their children sealed in their bedrooms, fed via a slot in the bottom of the door, because they had suffered “exposure”, and of course murdered vast numbers of elderly with ventilators to “protect” healthcare staff from their exhalations. Why is it necessary that one of the family be sacrificed? Does this comport with anything we know or even theorize about epidemiology theology, before we were instructed to change our opinions? Uh, trust the science visions. Do their visions of what they must do come from God, or the guy causing the disaster in the first place? Shut up, they explained.

Unlike in reality, we’re led without any real ambiguity to the conclusion that the cultists are completely correct. We know as of the start of Act II that they believe themselves to be correct, because they start executing each other to demonstrate their seriousness (as opposed to the lockdowns-for-you, French-Laundry-for-me reality), starting with the one guy who they subsequently red-herring as possibly malicious. Their visions also instruct them not to actually hurt the protagonists any more than bumps and bruises to keep them from escaping – so once we’ve established they’re serious about their belief, the protagonists are only in serious danger if the visions are actually true, as opposed to the reality where the cultists forbid the protagonists to eat or work or travel, forever, unless they submit to a perpetual stream of indignities.

When you consider the nature of the protagonists, this conception of the movie as COVID-but-real gets even clearer. Despite being a “family”, there are no ties of blood or marriage. A pair of homosexuals importing a baby may all be very fond of each other, but in reality their relations are not the kind of thing that empirically results in great sacrifices being made for others’ futures. But these perfect liberal Last Men (make sure to keep the pistol you got to guard against Hate Crimes unloaded in a Secure Locked Container so you can’t actually use it) are perfect protagonists for a movie whose triumphal climax is submitting to the will of the last dead cultist who actually believes something.

The warm fuzzies you’re supposed to receive at the end of the movie aren’t because the world didn’t end – it’s because the movie wants you to buy into a reality where the world might have ended, which retroactively justifies the insanity everyone volunteered or was forced into. It’s not that those people died for no good reason, it’s not even that you were lied to and stupid enough to believe it – God just gave the revelation to your betters and not to you.