The Watchers
Watching The Watchers, the ominous, spooky, and of course twisty first feature from Ishana Night Shyamalan is like seeing an apple fall not so very far from a tree. It was probably inevitable that a filmmaker who cut her teeth on the sets of Servant, Old, and Knock at the Cabin would pick up a few tricks from her famous father, a reigning (if often divisive) master of suspense. All the same, and for all its flaws, this supernatural thriller’s relatively classical construction shows the bright side of Hollywood’s historic generosity to nepo babies. At its best, the movie is a reminder that showbiz scions sometimes inherit a little creative power from their parents, alongside the big opportunities that (for better or worse) are their birthright.
Ishana couldn’t have picked a project more in the family wheelhouse. If you went into this movie cold, you would still walk out with the name Shyamalan on your mind and breath. Adapted from a novel of the same name by A. M. Shine, the film takes place in a magical Irish forest, a Bermuda Triangle of land rather than sea that appears on no map. Here sits a single-room house colloquially referred to as The Coop: a sort of reverse panopticon through which a desperate foursome of strangers is observed each night, lining up before a two-way mirror that separates them from the skittering somethings keeping them imprisoned inside. Shyamalan lays out this dilemma with suitable efficiency.
The latest addition to the menagerie is Mina (Dakota Fanning), an artist carrying a birdcage, a sketchbook, and a lot of genre-mandated family baggage. Mina’s new cellmates include the twitchy, impulsive Daniel (Oliver Finnegan); the compliant Kira (Georgina Campbell), whose husband disappeared into the woods and never came back; and the eldest of the captives, Madeline (Olwen Fouéré). The makeshift leader of the group, Madeline strictly upholds the rules laid down by the unseen Watchers: never be outdoors after nightfall; never go poking around the deep burrows from which these nocturnal creatures emerge; never turn your back on the mirror. If you’re going to throw a lot of exposition at the audience, it helps to put it in the mouth of an actor, like Fouéré, with some presence and gravitas.
It’s fair to wonder, for a while anyway, if these monsters are really out there, or if they are what they appear to be. After all, a Shyamalan has pulled this rug before, and elicited some major groans with the notorious truth of a rural community. For the record I am not one of these groaners. The Watchers sometimes plays like a mash-up of M. Night’s The Village and the mystery-laced YA sensation The Maze Runner. Suspense and intrigue is what it has going for it: So long as Ishana keeps us in the literal and figurative dark, her film exerts a clammy hold. We strain to catch a glimpse of what’s lurking in the shadows – the force that keeps yanking bodies off screen. The eventual reveal is well-handled, using analog tricks of composition and limited vantage to show her desire to not rely entirely on computer generation.
The Watchers pleasures are mostly in the delaying of revelations, not in their uncovering. I don’t think the film does a poor job wrapping up its mystery. I also don’t believe the final revelations are bad ones. What I’m finding so charming is most likely what others will deem the film’s failure. It’s completely straightforward. Ishana has made a horror film that doesn’t try for any kind of allegorical reading. It’s a very literal story and in the post modern world we live in particularly when we take horror films into consideration, the film’s 3rd act might almost seem too easy. I really enjoyed watching a film that didn’t try to hammer a real world message home by its ending. There’s a time and place for that type of story telling. I appreciate that Ishana went for something else here. It’s refreshing.
The Watchers ultimately has more mythology than genuine drama: Its pressure-cooker scenario never simmers into a war of wills, because these wilderness convicts are closer to surrogates for the audience to learn the full story. That would go for Mina as well, if not for Dakota Fanning’s seemingly marrow deep comfort with being on screen. Those eyes of hers are an actor’s dream facial feature. She’s been using her eyes to convey multitudes since she first put them to use in a sci fic context in War of the Worlds, directed by a filmmaker whose own suspense contraptions cast a long shadow over the Shyamalan canon.
M. Night’s Shyamalan’s first success was The Sixth Sense a film that took the world by storm. It would be unfair to rate Ishana’s skill by comparing The Watchers to her father’s first feature. We’ll more than likely leave The Watchers behind. It’s already being pushed out of theaters. Still, if the director hasn’t quite acquired her father’s immediate success I would argue she has inherited at least some of his idiosyncratic formal prowess. There are glimmers of real craft in her vision – signs that she could make something truly incredible. The Watchers is a fine film but I believe Ishana Night Shyamalan is at the beginning of a truly great career and I’ll be watching it with great interest.
