'The Watchers' is a middling horror debut
Ishana Night Shyamalan's first movie sets up a fascinating allegory, but then squanders it.
The Watchers represents the feature directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, the daughter of M. Night Shyamalan and a woman born around the time of her father’s big breakthrough with The Sixth Sense in 1999.
The film shares many aesthetic and thematic characteristics with the work of the senior Shyamalan, who is also on board as the film’s producer. Yes, there’s horror, suspense, and a big twist. The two Shyamalans also have many visual signatures in common.
Unfortunately, the film is mostly unsuccessful. It’s visually uninteresting, and it comes up with a robust central metaphor before dropping it. The third act drags on and on. The ending reminded me too much of Alex Garland’s Men, which no movie ever should.
Rather than shooting around her native Philadelphia area, which M. Night has done for most of his projects, Ishana has shot The Watchers in Ireland in this adaptation of A. M. Shine’s novel of the same name.
Dakota Fanning stars as Mina, a woman in her 20s who lives in Galway and is haunted by a traumatic tragedy from the past. A pet store employee, she is tasked with driving across the country to deliver a pet parrot, which takes her through an untouched part of the woods that, you guessed it, has supernatural properties. (The film doesn’t do nearly enough with the talking parrot, which I thought would figure in the plot in a critical moment. Also, the film’s events mean that likely irate pet store customer never received their parrot.)
Mina soon finds herself trapped in a small enclosure, “the coop,” with three other people (Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, and Oliver Finnegan.) They’re being observed by mysterious creatures known as “watchers,” it’s way too dangerous to leave, especially at night.
The film is consumed with repeating motifs involving mirrors and lots of obsolete consumer electronics; in an MST3K-like conceit, the only media the captives have been given to stay sane is a DVD set from an old season of a Big Brother-like reality TV show.
And, of course, it’s all about childhood trauma.
I like all these ideas, except Jordan Peele has already made much better films using versions of just about all of them.
There is a central metaphor that I felt was the film’s best idea: The creatures are watching the humans, hoping to emulate and eventually become them, while getting little things wrong periodically. This is, pretty clearly, an allegory of artificial intelligence and machine learning- and one that appears to see the danger in it, unlike movies like The Creator and Atlas, which have the overarching conclusion that A.I. is good. I had an inkling of this even before there was a line about the wrong number of fingers.
Unfortunately, The Watchers deviates from the allegory with a third act that not only drags on but turns out to be about something else entirely.
The performances are strong, with Fanning successfully holding the screen, including spending most scenes alone in the film’s first third. Olwen Fouéré, an Irish actress of some renown, is wonderfully creepy as the woman who emerges as the leader of the captives. And John Lynch makes a strong impression in a character — shades of Peele — who appears only in an old videotape.
But yeah, that Men-style ending practically ruins the whole thing.
The Watchers is presented under the logo of New Line Cinema, the 1990s indie stalwart that’s been part of Warner Brothers for years; it appears they slap on the New Line logo mainly for the sort of stuff that used to be called “elevated horror.”
So it’s not an especially auspicious debut for the young Shyamalan, although her father has bounced back from much worse movies.