If folks have an issue with nepotism in the show business, this film The Watchers isn’t going to help quell those issues. The supernatural horror film is directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan, who is the daughter of M. Night Shyamalan and stays within his wheelhouse of unnervingly styled mysteries. I don’t know if it was wise for her to make a film so close to the tone of her father’s films, but it is not a copy of his work. The Watchers follows an American woman named Mina, played by Dakota Fanning, who lives in Ireland in what looks like an unconnected way. She seems to not connect well with others and feels a bit dead inside. Fanning plays Mina early on as a weird lady who easily makes horror movie logic poor decisions. If you talk to the screen, this woman will make you scream at it. Mina gets a task from her job at a pet store to deliver a valuable bird. On the drive there, she ends up with her car dying in a dense forest, and as she attempts to walk to get some help, she ends up trapped in a magical forest with no way out. After seeing a mysterious older woman and following her, she ends up in a bunker-like structure; this woman named Madeline (Olwen Fouéré) tells her it’s called the Coop, a place where she, two others, and now Mina must stay each night, so that the Watchers, some unseen monsters in the forest can watch them. It’s like a Japanese Horror video game version of Big Brother. The other two people stuck in there are a young man named Daniel, played by Oliver Finnegan, and a woman named Ciara, played by Georgina Campbell. Ciara is married to a man we see in the cold open, and Daniel has a crush on Ciara; with Madeline playing a mother-like role of explaining the rules of survival to Mina, who is constantly confused and stubbornly focused on escaping the magic forest.
The film’s setting is very beautiful; with such a large lush forest in Ireland, we see a lot of it, and while this is a horror movie, the setting never feels that scary or creepy. The Watchers themselves are ugly-looking, but not something that made me feel uneasy. There’s some threat of danger every time we see Mina push against the rules to find ways out. The characters fit well together as this makeshift family in this weird situation, and the actors do very well at making them believable, even if I find Mina an annoying protagonist. All that said, the film didn’t do much for me with its story; it feels very been there done that before. As I said earlier, this does remind me of a Japanese horror game and would’ve been more interesting to me told that way with such a blank slate of a main character, Mina is. The cinematography is decent, but there are not a ton of captivating shots. The shots aren’t too dark, gray, or flat like a lot of films of late, or maybe I got lucky by seeing it on screen with a good light bulb in the projector. Most of the characters are pretty flat, but it was still enjoyable until about the last 15 minutes, and then the story stopped making sense. Now, this is based on a book, and after seeing how this movie ended, that’s not really a weird twist like her father’s film but a revelation the book for sure has to be better. It makes you question the logic of every choice made earlier in the film and feels like a waste of time. It really made me not enjoy even leaving the house to see this movie.
It’s her debut, and while The Watchers is something I wished I’d never watched, there is potential for improvement, and Ishana can only go up from here.
Score: D
RIOTUS 