You’ve got to go all the way back to 2006’s Stay Alive to find a film that rides these kind of batshit-crazy curves and swings for the fences — unsuccessfully.
Now, The Watchers is a much better film than Stay Alive, but it gives you the idea of the proper Reach vs. Grasp equation to use in contextualizing it. First-time director and second-generation filmmaker Ishara Night Shyamalan has superb instincts when it comes to visual storytelling, with a particular gift for asymmetries and finding menacing notes to golden and orange tones with cinematographer Eli Arenson. As for dialogue, it’s hard to tell if the problem comes from the source material (a novel by A.M. Shine) or heavy-handed execs trying to ramp up the pace, but as released, there are whole scenes that feel like the CliffsNotes of themselves, where subtext and backstory get mushed together into quick blasts of whatever is needed to move along to the next scene. Sort of like those first few flags on Yoshi’s Island at the beginning of Super Mario World.
Mina (Dakota Fanning, blond and brusque and sometimes a little belligerent) is a cipher on the run from both childhood guilt and her sister Lucy (yeah). Mina is a troubled woman who vapes her way through life (and apparently part-time shifts at an Irish pet store), and being the footloose kind, she’s able to take a yellow conure on a special delivery mission to a zoo “about a day’s journey from here.” Unfortunately, some sort of EMP/ley line trouble occurs, and her car won’t start, so she and the bird (whom she calls Darwin) head into the spooky forest, where they end up in a weird sort of Frank Lloyd Wright black-box theater installation with three other mysterious folk. The important one is Madeleine — played by Olwen Fouéré, who is the go-to actress for genre filmmakers in need of a steely-white-haired woman of a certain age who can play hero or villain, weak or strong, and bring some degree of class to a messy endeavor. When you see she’s in a film, it’s like when Betty Buckley is in a horror film: You know the assignment is going to be understood.
When the sun sets, the occupants of this space must gather in front of a two-way mirror that encompasses an entire wall and then exhibit themselves for an unseen but particularly clackety and moany audience of unspeakable provenance. And then things get several degrees of complicated, with stakes that seem to raise themselves further and further, to varying effect. There really are some unexpectedly effective moments that play against our expectations as audiences who’ve seen movies and read books and theorized about things on the internet, but The Watchers never quite sticks the landing — it feels like it’s been cut back too far and then micro-retooled in several 10-second bursts.
Fanning is good, underplaying and letting the insanity around her do the primary driving. Fouéré digs in with relish, devouring scenes while reading as subdued and classy — it’s a remarkable feat, and it’s why she’s such a valuable resource for horror and the fantastic. The rest of the film can be tense, occasionally freaky and cruel, and sometimes inert. Shyamalan has an interesting career ahead of her, and hopefully one that will allow her a less hesitant approach (which, again, may have to do with studio interference — that’s certainly what it feels like) to material. But as it stands, The Watchers is an interesting debut and an ultimately meh horror film. That said, extra points for quality conure representation.
