Yahoo News ‘The Watchers’ Review: Ishana Night Shyamalan’s Folk-Horror Tale Gets Lost In Its Own Plot
So, is it The Watchers or is it The Watched? In North America it’s the former, in the UK and Ireland it’s the latter, and it’s a testament to the all-over-the-shop plotting of Ishana Night Shyamalan’s feature debut that it doesn’t really make much difference whichever way you look at it. Working from a folk-horror novel by A.M. Shine, Shyamalan takes a simple single-location genre premise — literally, it’s a cabin-in-the-woods story — and somehow creates a thriller that’s both unnecessarily complex and almost entirely uninteresting.
Alarm bells ring when the curtain rises, and a voiceover tells us of the forest that’s not on any map, that draws in lost souls “like a moth to a flame” and is so deadly that “those that wander in never come back out”. To illustrate this, we see a stranded backpacker — whose identity we learn later — running terrified through said woods only to find himself, Blair Witch-style, back where he started. Something’s on his trail, but what? He soon finds out. “That’s impossible,” he gasps with his dying breath, the first of many teasing horror tropes.
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Then off we go to Galway, where pet-shop worker Mina (Dakota Fanning) lives alone and in a state of existential torment, still grieving for her mother who died 15 years before. To celebrate the anniversary of her death, Mina puts on a wig and heads to a busy bar, where she pretends to be a sultry ballerina. Will she get it on with the guy who hits on her? We never find out, because, the next day, Mina has a job to do: deliver a rare parrot to a nearby zoo (and if you’ve ever wondered where zoos get their livestock from, well, now you know). Along the way, Mina stops at a gas station, where dozens of fly-posts show the faces of missing hikers.
Before you can think it, every electrical gizmo in the car goes haywire and Mina breaks down in the forest. Christening the parrot Darwin (“If we’re going to die together, you may as well have a name”), Mina sets off in search of human life, only to find herself disorientated to such an extent that she soon loses sight of the car. As the night closes in, Mina spots an older, white-haired lady who beckons to her from the doorway of an isolated cabin. “If you care for your life, you’re going to have to run,” she says (presumably since “Come with me if you want to live” was already taken).
Inside the cabin, AKA “The Coop”, the woman introduces herself as Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), and Mina meets the other residents: Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). All three have been there for several months, if not longer, and Ciara is expecting the return of her husband John — the hapless hiker we saw bumped off at the beginning — at any moment. The Coop is a simple, four-walled room with a vast two-way mirror, and, later that night, Mina joins hands with the other three to make her debut in front of the creatures that gather to watch on the other side. No one has ever seen them, but, says Daniel, Madeline has a theory “that just seeing one can drive you mad”.
Shyamalan put all this into place in a crisp 20 minutes or so, suggesting a tight, no-frills chiller, but from here The Watchers (or is it The Watched?) seems to spiral almost out of control. Drawing on the well of mythology that has fueled much better Irish-set phantasmagorias (for one, Lorcan Finnegan’s 2016 Without Name), Shyamalan’s film posits the existence of changelings: malevolent fairies that can take on human form. This we find out when the trio uncover a hidden underground bunker and discover the true identity of “The Professor”, a shadowy figure who, it transpires, built The Coop in the first place.
The Professor waffles on about all this stuff in the archaic .Mov files that Mina finds stashed on his old Apple Mac, and time genuinely seems to stand still as a tidal wave of exposition washes away any and all sense of dread that has been building up. In amongst all this ominous guff about ancient societies of the fae The Professor reveals that there is a way out of the forest — but it will take Mina and her newfound friends far beyond their self-imposed safety zone.
Surprisingly for a first-timer, Shyamalan can handle horror, and there are some effective scares whenever the film finds its creepy groove. Plot, however, is another matter, and Mina’s heavy-handed backstory gets in the way whenever it is mentioned, adding a weak layer of allegory and woefully invoking the specter of Tarkovsky whenever Mina hallucinates in the forest. Similarly, the film draws up a firm set of rules that it promptly abandons. “Never turn your back on the mirror,” warns Madeline. But why? (And nothing seems to happen when they do.)
Things seem to come to a natural end around the 75-minute mark, which is no disgrace as these kinds of films go, but The Watchers (or is it The Watched?) presses on for another interminable 25 minutes, with an extended coda that’s twistier than Shyamalan Sr. doing the twist again like he did last summer (and the summer before that). The end result is a labored mystery that will leave audiences punch-drunk from revelation after revelation, finally leaving us all with a face as stunned into close-up submission as Dakota Fanning’s, here giving her mooniest, most saucer-eyed performance since War of the Worlds.
Title: The Watchers
Studio: Warner Bros
Release date: June 7, 2024
Director-screenwriter: Ishana Night Shyamalan
Cast: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Oliver Finnegan, Olwen Fouere
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hr 42 min
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