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The Watchers
Trailer: New Line Cinema

The Watchers
Directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan
Rated PG-13
Watched 7 June 2024
#TheWatchers

The Watchers isn't must-see cinema.

Are You Watching?

Let’s get this out of the way: nepotism cry babies can take their grievances elsewhere.

Ishana Night Shyamalan is a talented filmmaker embarking on a promising career and The Watchers isn’t simply an example of a daughter riding on her father’s coattails in pursuit of a vanity project. In this case, the father is M. Night Shyamalan, who directed a great movie, The Sixth Sense, before devolving into a plague of movies with speaking cameos that distract and surprise endings that land with a thud. Sure, her credits are limited and her father figures heavily in them: she worked on dad’s Old movie and Servant TV series. But it still takes talent to do the work she’s done.

For her feature directorial debut, Shyamalan has also taken on writing the screenplay adaptation of Irish author A.M. Shine’s The Watchers, which is labeled as a "spine-chilling Gothic horror novel."

The good: Shyamalan creates a suitably mysterious atmosphere as the movie begins and the main characters are introduced. It’s also a good cast, led by Dakota Fanning (The Equalizer 3), who plays a troubled young woman named Mina. She’s got a dark side that’s revealed via flashbacks and there are interesting attempts to dovetail her personal tragedy into the horrors encountered in an uncharted, haunted Irish forest that is all about the dark and the dreary.

Interesting, but not entirely successful.

And that leads to the bad: in the absence of air conditioning in the theatre, the chills are hard to come by. And there isn’t all that much at stake.

Welcome to the Show

The notion of a forest with bizarre paranormal phenomena is grounded in reality. The notoriety of the Hoia-Baciu Forest in Romania has reached legendary status. There’s also the Black Forest in Germany and the Screaming Woods in Britain, among others.

What causes that paranormal activity? That’s the stuff of numerous para-reality TV series and the efforts of amateur ghostbusters sporting EMF and PKE meters.

In The Watchers, Mina’s car conks out upon entering this forbidden zone. Setting out on foot, she sees disturbing signs, such as "Point of No Return 108," before finding a curious concrete cabin in the woods. There, she meets three other emotionally disturbed individuals and a theatrical, stage-like setting in which they live out life as entertainment for the creatures that roam the forest by night.

Several rules are rattled off in short order, but none of them roll off the tongue like the three classic rules in Gremlins. Here, a couple are: never leave the cabin after sunset and never, ever turn your back on the mirror.

The mirror. It’s a metaphorical self-reflection, but it’s also the looking glass through which the outside critters watch their captives. It’s kind of like the old rule of stage theatre: never turn your back on the audience.

Twisted Faerie Tales

It all boils down to a stab at melding modern social commentary with classic Gothic tropes. And so it is the cabin has an old-school tube TV and a DVD player with one DVD: Lair of Love. On a couple occasions, the movie’s focus switches to this unsuccessful attempt at semi-satirizing reality TV love-seekers. All it proves is watching twenty-something Brits feign love in a forced setting is every bit as grating as watching twenty-something Americans do it.

And it also casts a spotlight on other attempts to pull in other themes and juxtapositions. Those attempts – much like her father’s horrible cameos – become a distraction.

For example, Mina has a sister, Lucy. Mina and Lucy? No doubt a not-so-veiled reference to Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra from another novel of spine-chilling Gothic horror, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That sits alongside a reference to Alice in Wonderland and a toy stuffed rabbit found, in of all places, a rabbit hole.

As for Mina, she sets out to take an ultra-rare parrot from Galway to Belfast before losing the forest for the trees, so to speak. The parrot doesn’t say much. But he does like to say, "Try not to die." As it’s presented in the movie, the impact of Mina’s personal tragedy is somewhat undermined as it’s revealed she was parroting her mother’s words before her own life-altering horror strikes.

Reality Bites

These connections might work better in a novel that can take more time to explore the creative landscape and play with the underlying concepts. In a movie, particularly in The Watchers, these attempts at an artful shorthand to convey – in essence – karma and the Circle of Life fall flat.

Voyeurism. Reality TV. A parrot. Bringing people – particularly lost loved ones – back to life. All of these elements could blend together into something truly powerful. But the core element involving Gothic lore and the disappearance from modern civilization of a certain species from that lore ultimately backfires as the story tries to create a perpetual sense of impending global doom. The tension and the necessary sense of foreboding never materialize.

Nonetheless, The Watchers is competently directed. Ishana Shyamalan shows plenty of promise, but her perilous path in Hollywood will require endurance and the ability to steer clear of her father’s flawed narrative instincts and speaking cameos. And also all those derivative pop culture references.

Some of us will be watching closely.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.