Film Review - The Watchers
Images courtesy of Warner Bros.
The Watchers, based on A. M. Shine’s novel, is the feature directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, and tells the story of Mina (Dakota Fanning) an American living in Galway, Ireland, directionless and closed-off following the death of her mother many years ago. After becoming lost in the middle of a seemingly never-ending forest, Mina encounters the Coop, a small building with a large window through which her and three other captives (Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan) are voyeuristically observed by unseen nocturnal creatures called the Watchers - who kill anyone found outside the Coop at night.
To say her father, M. Night Shyalaman, and his films have a tumultuous reputation would be putting it lightly, and the query running through my head prior to viewing The Watchers was this point of comparison with her father. Ishana exhibits similarly idiosyncratic attitudes to storytelling conventions of exposition and reveals, but unfortunately displays little savviness in the execution. Extremely evident throughout The Watchers is this sense of finding footing. The premise shows significant promise - notions of voyeurism underpin much of the film's interesting middle act, where the Watchers themselves are introduced, and are posited against various clips of a fictional early-2000s reality TV show à la Big Brother or Love Island, a creative choice I felt was brilliant in theory. Also brilliant in theory is a scene early in the film, when Ciara (Georgina Campbell, who is great yet underutilised in this) performs a dance for the Watchers because they enjoy it – in a better film I feel this would be a brilliant commentary on the performance we undertake in our daily lives. These ideas, as well as themes of grief, bargaining and authority are framed through imitative Irish folkloric iconography, and lore that attempts to firmly root it in an obsession with mythology, which makes me interested in reading the book - especially since it feels like the film does very little service to it.
Annoyingly, the awesome breadth of themes the film tackles should work for me on paper. I’m quite fond of when films bite off more than they can chew thematically – it often gives me a lot to think about - but it doesn’t work for me here, on account of a lack of finesse. Strung together with fishing wire is a deeply underwritten narrative that lacks the relative soul of similar films such as The Village (2004) - directed by M Night. Shyamalan,and a close point of comparison narrative wise due to their similar settings and themes of control. The Village is awash with romantic notions of isolation, healing and perseverance embedded deep in the film’s technical construction, things noticeably absent in The Watchers’ formal composition, consequently making it feel remarkably surface level in an emotional sense. I hate to frequently compare her to her father, but the film’s obsession with these other-worldly concepts and twists simply lacks M. Night’s bravado use of these notions, whose twists feel substantially rooted in an emotional extension of the film’s narrative. The heavy-handedness of the folklore elements in the film’s second half rather sloppily attempt to convey the fable narrative further, opting for heavy, clunky exposition of background lore to prop up threads that weren’t really a central focus of the film to begin with. I love exposition when it’s written with a clear eye for delivery and investment, but it falls flat for me here, coinciding with this undercooked effort at filmmaking.
As I found myself thinking about the exposition however, it struck me that criticising exposition is something I rarely do to modern films, which often overcorrect on avoiding exposition - in a weird way it’s an extremely ‘mid-2000s’ complaint, and this got me thinking about the identity The Watchers takes on. Interestingly, the filmfeatures the pleasant return of the pre-2011 New Line Cinema logo. In many respects this is an additional microcosm for how ‘mid-2000s’ the film feels at times, utilising messy storytelling flourishes unseen in the average film today, casting Dakota Fanning as the lead, and though this unfortunately isn’t nearly enough to get me to like it – I’ve seen plenty of bad mid-2000s films - it does signal Ishana’s sensibilities as a filmmaker interested in that particular mode of film, and in that respect I eagerly anticipate what she does next. There are whispers of a great movie in The Watchers, with Ishana’s directorial eye occasionally shining through the film’s middling aspects, however at present her directing style feels imitatively beholden to superficial notions of M. Night’s storytelling sensibilities, and I’d love for her to find her footing amidst the depths of the forest.
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The Watchers is screening in cinemas now. For tickets and more info, click here.