It’s based on a novel, but one which Shyamalan strays from the source material around the midpoint. The reviewer stated the book was too grim, that without the changes the movie might not do well in ticket sales. Turns out that the uninvited guests are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This isn’t a spoiler according to the reviewer. Skimming a few other reviews revealed much the same.
"What if Christians tried to force nonbelievers to murder others because of their own beliefs?"
"Do they do that? Like, ever?"
"No, but it would look really bad if we could show them doing that!"
The pesky kooks knocking at the cabin to proselytize are stand-ins for the Christian right’s attempts to impose their religious beliefs on others.
What Christian extremists do is force you to behave in a way that will prevent you from coming to spiritual harm. There is literally no Christian belief or teaching about definite worldly consequences to spiritual actions.
On the other hand, it would fit a lot better with environmentalists or racial/gender activists, who DO make demands on non-believers to act against their own interests to avert something bad their beliefs warn will happen.
The point of which is that the end of the world is the ultimate triumph. Handle's "Messiah" is structured chronologically relating to the life of Jesus, and the Halleluiah chorus comes in at the end, for the Second Coming. The Halleluiah Chorus is about the Apocalypse. The most cheerful and upbeat funeral song ever, "When the Saints Go Marching In", is about the Apocalypse. OTOH, the same people who demonize Christians and see them as a massive threat to a free society, also see imminent apocalypses from a mild flu or the polar ice caps or greenhouse effects or nuclear winter or deforestation or school shootings.
Again, a misdirected idea, since the point of the story of Abraham is that his God is not like all the other gods and utterly rejects the concept of human sacrifice. The reason we find the story so problematic and the demand so inexplicable and are more horrified by Abraham's initial acquiescence than impressed by his faith, is BECAUSE the prohibition on such sacrifices handed down from Heaven has MADE it so antithetical to our society thousands of years later. To someone of Abraham's time, it was a perfectly normal, acceptable and reasonable demand for a god to make (e.g. The Illiad). The narrative gets strung along as far as it does to make a point to the contemporaries of Abraham, Moses and the Israelites that Abraham's faith is no less than that of Agamemnon, that the Jews (and later, Christians) refrain from human sacrifice not out of a selfish refusal to offer up what is most precious, but because their God is awesome and would never demand it, and would rather instead make that Sacrifice Himself. The whole point of the link between Abraham, Issac and Jesus is precisely that God does not ask us to sacrifice lives to him, but instead sacrifices Himself for us. The point is that it is voluntary, not imposed, and without an "or else" impelling it.
Again, a dumb allegory.
Allegory only works if it works on both levels. First of all, the trailer suggests that there are real and direct consequences to the refusal and that this not merely their beliefs, but a factual consequence. My point was that the consequence was immaterial to the demand and insufficient for anyone to overcome. At worst, stripped of all other context, the Biblical sacrifice is a Sophie's Choice between two loved ones (God vs Issac) for Abraham. You don't criticize such a choice being imposed by substituting an inferior one (family member vs faceless strangers) or a radically different one (sacrifice loved one as an act of devotion to God or sacrifice loved one to avert immediate and drastic material consequence).
