The Watchers movie review: Dakota Fanning does her best to lift the film

So, there is a forest in the “west of Ireland” that does not show up on any map, that “attracts souls like moths to a flame”, and where, once in, there is no coming back.

Mina (Fanning) drives right into it while delivering a parrot to a zoo from Galway to Belfast, a distance of some 200-km plus. Surely, there are better ways of organising this transfer. And of landing Mina in the aforesaid forest?

By then Mina has been established as a sad figure, who has descended to these Irish parts from faraway America, partly to escape a family tragedy and her concerned sister.

So when she does go missing with this “rare” bird that the Belfast zoo wanted “urgently”, no one comes looking. Not even the shopkeeper who sent her the way of the zoo, and who till then has kept a close watch on her, including how often she takes vaping breaks.

Once in, Mina discovers three others like her, similarly lost in the woods and hiding out in this cabin, which they call the Coop. They can venture out in the morning to hunt and for other things, but have to be back before dark as, at night, the Watchers come out to see them. One wall of the Coop is all glass on their side and all window on the outside (somewhat like an interrogation room), and the Watchers must be able to see them at all times at night, or they will come hunting.

During the day time, the scary beasts stay deep in the burrows. But a day is too short a time for the four humans to escape the forest on foot (others have tried), and so the four are stuck in the Coop — including history professor Madeline (Fouere), Ciara (Campbell) whose husband who went out has presumably been killed by the Watchers, and a youngster called Daniel (Finnegan).

There is some sort of a back story to these four, but it actually does not matter as the film goes around in circles establishing why we should be very, very afraid. It resorts to cheap tricks like eerie CCTV footage, scraping and tearing noises, growls, loud knocking at doors, and some laboured mood-setting. But in the absence of any real emotion building or mystery (except the twist, always the Shyamalan twist), there are no real scares here.

The nicest touch is that for entertainment, the Coop has video cassettes of a reality show where people are locked together in a love lair. But why this particular reality show? No reason.

Fanning, whose quiet, worried face suggests questions with uneasy answers, does her best to lift the film. Fouere meanwhile channels her inner Glenn Close.

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The worst part is how the film digs itself out of the forest — with a ridiculous solution that was staring the prisoners right in the face.

“I haven’t figured it all out yet,” says Ciara as the film finally works its way around to myths, folk tales, fairies and “halflings”. No kidding.

The Watchers movie director: Ishana Night Shyamalan
The Watchers movie cast: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouere, Oliver Finnegan
The Watchers movie rating: 2 stars