Movie review «The Watchers»

Starting June 6, you can watch a new horror movie in theaters «The Watchers», based on the novel of the same name by Irish writer A.M. Shine. This is the feature film directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, the daughter of the master of mystical thrillers/horror M. Night Shyamalan, who also produced the film. In the review below, we discuss how well the young debutante realizes herself in the eerie genre on which her famous father made his name.

«The Watchers»

Genre a horror movie about the supernatural
Director Ishana Night Shyamalan
Starring Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Oliver Finnegan, Oluen Fuere, Alistair Brammer, John Lynch
Premiere movie theaters
Year of issue 2024
Website IMDb

A slightly sad blonde girl named Mina lives in Ireland and works in a pet shop. One day, her boss gives her an assignment — to transport a valuable parrot to a zoo somewhere near Belfast. So the girl gives the bird the nickname Darwin and sets off on a journey that involves traveling through dense Irish forests. It is in one of them that Mina’s cell phone treacherously turns off and the car stalls. After a futile forest search, the heroine meets an active grandmother, Madeline, who is heading to a strange hideout in the middle of the forest.

Madeline urges her new friend to follow her if she wants to survive. There are two other people in the vault: a twitchy young man, Daniel, and a young woman, Ciara. When darkness falls, they all line up right in front of a huge mirror-window as if on cue, resembling mannequins in a boutique window. In this way, the inhabitants of the vault fulfill one of the strict rules that must be followed. And it is then that they begin to be closely watched by mysterious creatures from the outside — the Watchers.For her feature film debut, young director Ishana Night Shyamalan, who is not yet 25, decided to adapt A.M. Shine’s work, which appeared on bookstore shelves in 2022. She tries to break into the major cinematic league by ungodly imitation of her famous father’s style. But it turns out to be very mediocre.

At its core «The Watchers» — a forest folk horror about the supernatural. The theme of mythological Irish monsters in dark Irish forests, the general layout of which resembles a place in West Virginia from the slasher «The Wrong Turn», has already been exhaustively discussed by Corin Hardy in his «The Hallow» (2015). For him, by the way, it was also his debut, and it turned out to be much more exciting and less pretentious at the same time.

The story begins with the viewer being introduced to the main character, who doesn’t seem to realize who she really is. Later, when Dakota Fanning’s character is already in the «fairy forest», Ishaan turns on his trademark Shyamalan, and the plot turns into a boring voicing of the thesis that we are all, to some extent, spectators who are not fed with bread — let us watch others through the TV screen. Interestingly, Jordan Peele recently addressed a similar theme of human thirst for spectacle in his «Nope». And he did it much more gracefully.

However, halfway through the story, this idea is quickly lost, and it is replaced by Mina’s tragic backstory. The problem is that this person does not evoke any empathy, as well as the other prisoners «huts in the woods». Where the script implies tension, such as the episode with Ciara’s husband, who seems to have returned to the bunker after wandering in the forest for several days, there is only indifference. And where there is room for some kind of mystery or even allegorical interpretation of events, it turns out that Ishaan has practically nothing to offer. Dakota Fanning gives a single stone expression to everything that happens during the 100 minutes of running time, so her character is literally a good Mina at a bad game. Frequent guest in horror Oluen Fuerte, who you could see in the latest «Texas Chainsaw Massacre» or the most recent «Tarot», does nothing but remind us of strict rules throughout the movie, which is quite annoying. There’s not much to say about the others because the filmmakers give too little information about the characters, so they don’t arouse any sincere interest.

Ishana Shyamalan took only her first serious step in feature film, and unfortunately, it turned out to be a bust. The director tried to operate with dosed atmospheric horror, to build up tension and to rely on mystery for a while. The result was a kind of Shyamalan on the lowest possible level, seasoned with gloomy Irish folklore.