'The Watchers' Is Not Worth The Watch
The Watchers is another one of those films that UK and Irish distributors have judged as having too alienating and unmarketable a title, so it’s been pitched in both Britain and Ireland as The Watched. (The Watchers is an Irish-set and co-produced film) The slight confusion over what Ishana Night Shyamalan, the eldest daughter of the Split and The Sixth Sense director M Night, has actually named her debut film takes on a shade of disappointment once you get to the end of the film.
As the title is shown on-screen at the start of the film and before the end credits, Shyamalan had the opportunity to play on how characters traverse from being spectated to spectators; perhaps the second time we see the title, it’s changed to reflect this subject-object relationship. Unfortunately, The Watchers isn’t interested in subtle perspective shifts or acute voyeuristic psychologies, instead wasting Shyamalan’s able filmmaking instincts on a single-minded and self-blunted folk horror tale, and the craft is far too conventional and ineffective for such a high-concept story.
Mina (Dakota Fanning) is an American living in Galway, Ireland, working at a pet store in a perpetual dissociative haze after the death of her mother fifteen years prior. When she’s tasked with transporting a rare yellow parakeet across the country, Mira has one final night of putting on a wig, pretending to be a different person to handsome strangers in bars, and driving off to make the delivery. When her car breaks down at the treeline of an expansive, eerie forest, she finds her only refuge in a modernist bunker with huge, one-way glass – but with the mirror on the inside and the transparent glass on the outside.
