The Watchers

The names are interesting here. The Watchers is based on a book by A.M. Shine, and is directed by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter. That’s funny. I don’t care who you are - that’s funny right there. It demonstrates that Ishana Night Shyamalan (making her directorial debut) has inherited her dad’s craft of filmmaking, when it comes to creating tension with visuals and sound (including lack of sound). Unfortunately, she has also inherited his apparent need to throw in a plot twist with details that get increasingly more complicated, until you feel like you’re at a different movie. That’s what happens with The Watchers. It’s a compelling, engaging thriller that ultimately self-sabotages with a wordy, convoluted explanation from at least one different genre. I have a feeling the source material does a better job with the marriage of action and information. The Watchers (the film) has the good, bad, and ugly of the Shyamalan stamp.

After an opening sequence that shows a man frantically stumbling through the woods, passing ominous “Point of No Return” signs, we meet our main character, Mina. We wonder if her parents were Bram Stoker fans, because her sister’s name is Lucy. They’ve had little to no contact in the last 15 years, since Mina was heavily responsible for their mother’s death in a car accident. Now Mina works at a pet shop in Ireland. She’s assigned to deliver a parrot to a zoo near Belfast. Her GPS takes her to a very woodsy back road, and suddenly she loses all signal, and the car breaks down. It’s getting dark, and there are unusual noises. There’s a little house nearby, and an old woman who looks like she stepped out of a Salem witch film urges her to run inside.

Mina is now the fourth current resident of what they call “the coop.” There’s the aforementioned Madeline (Olwen Fouéré, recently in Tarot), Ciara (Georgina Campbell from Barbarian), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). A giant window serves as a two-way mirror at night. Every night at the same time, they are to stand in front of it. They can only see themselves, but inhabitants of the woods congregate from outside to watch the people inside. There’s no danger during the day. They are free to go outside and hunt for food, but they’re so far away from civilization that they have to go back to the coop before dark. If they are caught out at night, it’s bad news.

My favorite part of The Watchers is when we are in the woods with them, all trying to figure out at the same time what’s going on and what to do. The Shyamalan family knows their way around sound design, and how to generate dread with it. Once the twist arrives on the scene like a traveler with suitcases of backstories to dump on us, things go south. The last third of the movie is just navigating through all this new information. The cast is effective. Dakota Fanning, now 30 years old, ably carries the film as Mina. She has deep blue eyes and an expressive face, even when she’s not really making an expression. Have you any idea how weird it feels to develop a little crush on someone you’ve been seeing since they were a child actor?

I drank the Kool-Aid with favorable reviews for M. Night Shyamalan’s last two - Knock at the Cabin and Old. I also quite enjoyed The Visit. Those three managed to work, with their twists not bogging them down too much. Maybe he feels he set a high bar and painted himself into a corner with The Sixth Sense, and tries more and more desperately to keep it up. He obviously has a gift, as does his daughter. I’d love to see them just tell a great story without being so preoccupied with manufacturing an elaborate rug pullout. The best moments in The Watchers take place in the uncertain woods, with the silence being scarier than anything we could possibly hear or see. We don’t always need to know why it’s happening, or what it means.