The Watchers

From the advertising, The Watchers looked like any standard psychological supernatural horror film with a hint of an artsy edge, but what piqued people’s interest was learning that it was going to be directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan, the daughter of notoriously divisive director, M. Night Shyamalan. With this being her feature directorial debut after working on a few of her father’s project behind the scenes, this movie suddenly became a testing ground to see if Ishana had the potential to take on the directing mantle and stand apart from her father, who is known for making incredibly shaky projects that more often than not fail but do so in a spectacularly hilarious fashion. For a first-time directing job with her father still guiding her hand as a producer, the results are exactly what you’d predict a combo like this would deliver, something that draws from every pile of the quality spectrum.

Set in Ireland, a 28-year-old artist named Mina (played by Dakota Fanning) is asked to deliver a bird by her workplace, which leads her into a vast forest landscape that she quickly gets lost in. Trying to flag someone down, she is caught off guard by strange noises that seem to be scurrying around her and is suddenly led into an isolated housing unit that contains three other people: Ciara, Daniel and Madeline (played by Georgina Campbell, Oliver Finnegan, and Olwen Fouéré). They inform Mina that they have been held captive for several months by beings known as The Watchers, who come and view them every night through a two-way window and kill anyone who tries to leave when the sun goes down. Wishing to not live the rest of her life as entertainment for faceless monsters, Mina tries to find out a way to escape as the isolation makes her think back on her own troubled past and as the sanity of these four starts to unravel, it will be a gamble whether or not any of make it out of this forest alive.

To no one’s surprise, The Watchers is a fairly divisive movie that received mostly mixed to negative reviews from critics but seemed to operate passably enough on its solid tension-building, directing and acting for some audiences to passively tolerate it. It isn’t a great start for Ishana and there is a lot of progress to be made but considering how she was probably taught to direct by her father, it could’ve been a lot weirder.

The positive angle to take from this mess is that it doesn’t entirely feel like Ishana’s fault, as even with this movie’s several faults, her strengths as a filmmaker do shine through. While it carries a lot of familiar tropes that are synonymous with her father’s style, like poor line deliveries and destroying a great idea through pointlessly long-winded and unfrightening lore building, it doesn’t feel exactly one-for-one, and she has held onto some of her father’s best directing attributes, like beautiful often surreal imagery, a good ability to build suspense and a sense of mystery, and picking up on interesting premises that don’t just want to follow the norm. This premise, which came from a novel written by A. M. Shine, feels like it could make for a solid story if adapted corrected, but it sadly is not constructed as such.

The script (also written by Ishana Shyamalan) is not very good, containing dialogue that is very exposition-heavy, characters that don’t have enough solid backstory for people to invest in them, and a heavy leaning towards a certain portion of supernatural mythology that bogs down a lot of the unknown terror that came in the first act, feeling more like a young adult book rather than an adult horror film. The first two acts are decently handled, and the vague, almost experimental nature of the film means that it’s not entirely clear where it’s going, but once the truth of who and what the Watchers are is revealed, it just loses a lot of interest. There is room to highlight some ideas with this premise, and it feels like the movie is trying to say something about the concept of emulating people and living through a fake lens (which is made abundantly obvious by the characters being forced to watch reality television), but it never fully comes together or explains what it’s trying to say come the ending, it just feels like a bit of a waste. Ironically, the film is also fairly dull even when it is handled tolerably, placing Ishana in an awkward position where she can’t reach the same level of bafflingly awful that her father can sometimes reach because she has better structure, therefore meaning her version of bad is not fun enough to excuse away so easily.

In comparison to how most actors perform in a Shyamalan film, Ishana seems able to direct them a bit better, with each actor in this movie still having a slightly weird and off delivery, but never to the point of feeling like it overshadows their actual talent. Sometimes this happens for the one-off roles like Alastair Brammer and especially Siobhan Hewlett in a roughly handled flashback sequence, but the main four don’t have any true moments of being laughably bad. It can still be a little weird due to the scripting and directing not being perfect, but it feels like these four could be capable actors with better material. Dakota Fanning as the lead is the easily the best out of the lot, probably due to her style of acting already carrying this feeling of bizarre detachment, so she doesn’t feel too out of place (if anything, it would be interesting to see her work with M. Night specifically to see the results).

Her story is not the best handled and given the direction the film goes in, it feels like they missed an opportunity to tie her into their mythology in a way that would’ve been far more effective than what was actually revealed, but she does survive this experience mostly unscathed. The other characters aren’t very interesting and only feel like exposition-sponges, but their acting is solid enough to not make them unlikeable. Oliver Finnegan is a little rough around the edges, but doesn’t get any worse as the film continues, Georgina Campbell is passable but has very little to work with going forward, and Olwen Fouéré has a really cool voice and eerie look that makes her a perfect fit with this tone and premise, but the way the character is used is not that good and her dialogue is always centred around the weird rules and mythology surrounding this world which just doesn’t feel natural in the slightest. The Watchers themselves are thankfully kept in the shadows for most of the picture, with the gruesome sound design and hinted shades and figures being good enough to keep things decently unnerving, but when it’s revealed what they are and what they’re doing, it does feel a little less creepy.

As previously stated, this is a very nice-looking picture with a budget of about $30 million (which it doesn’t feel like it needs given its limited scope, but regardless), so it’s able to make even a single isolated cabin in a large expansive forest still look cinematic. There’s a lot of cool camerawork done by Eli Arenson that does a great job creating a surreal and otherworldly atmosphere, with bizarre angles, fun framing that uses the two-way mirror in a wonderfully odd manner, and makes this forest feel pretty threatening. The symmetrical way the trees are positioned along with their sharp protruding branches makes it look like an earthy cage, with the character of focus usually being eclipsed underneath all the foliage. It’s cramped enough to feel claustrophobic, but also vast and wide-open enough to feel exposing, as well as get across how seemingly unending it is whenever they pan across the mountainside.

It has a mysterious foreboding element through the use of a constant fog which brings a mood without feeling too obvious, the lighting is very dim but it’s never hard to make anything out, the contrast between the deep sea blue on the outside and the warm, almost blaring orange inside of the cabin is a nice imbalance, and despite the camera work featuring a lot of fun angles and shots, it never feels like it’s pointlessly showing off or constructing a weird shot for the sake of it, it usually always has a purpose behind the framing. The bunker doesn’t have much to work with in terms of looking interesting outside of the mirror, but with that in mind, it’s never featured too much to the point that you feel frustrated being stuck there (they can at least exit it once the sun comes up) and anytime they are forced to be ‘’watched’’ over, it kind of has a stage play quality to how they talk to their ‘’audience’’ and how they are lined up, it’s a little unique. The musical score by Abel Korzeniowski provides a good melodic piece that is soft and atmospheric but doesn’t prove to be extremely original and as the film keeps going, it can feel a little repetitive.

The Watchers was hit with a pretty poor critical rating once it was showcased to the public (with a Rotten Tomato rating of 31), and while the movie doesn’t do a lot to avoid these criticisms, it honestly doesn’t feel poor enough to beat down any further. Considering this not only came from the daughter of a director who can make memorable solid content but one who’s become known more for failing rather than succeeding, it honestly could’ve been a lot worse for a first-time gig and showed that she could have a solid directing career if she continues to evolve her craft. She appears to have held onto the good qualities of her father’s directing style like great visuals, focusing on interesting premises and knowing how to build suspense, ambiguity and tension, and while the flaws are still persistent like awkward line readings and forcing in an overly complicated explanation for an otherwise brilliant simple idea, they aren’t as noticeably bad as when her father does it. As of now, The Watchers feels like a slightly shaky testing ground that might not have produced the greatest results but gave enough to show she can grow from this. If you are more accepting of the direction this film goes in, it might work out for you overall, but for those that don’t really connect with the amount of Celtic mythology that is shoved into what could’ve been a wonderfully ambiguous picture, you might have to question things a bit before you decide whether or not to watch.