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The Watchers Squanders Its Creepy Premise
M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter makes her directorial debut with a horror movie about reality TV and the strange creature that watch it.
When a disoriented Mina (Dakota Fanning), having gotten lost in the weird woods while distractedly driving from Galway to Belfast for work, becomes the latest addition to this involuntary ensemble, she learns that the cabin’s inhabitants are expected to line up at nightfall as though taking a curtain call, waiting on the sounds of their unseen audience arriving. When you’re the child of a famous filmmaker, comparisons are inevitable, and The Watchers does nothing to create distance between its director and the auteurist signatures of her parent — there’s a genuinely effective genre premise, and there’s a final-act twist, and there are some suspenseful set pieces and camera movements in between. The trouble with the recent tendency of horror to be explicitly About Trauma, turning every supernatural phenomenon and thing going bump in the night into a potential metaphor, is that so few of those movies are willing to put the work into really rendering the pain its characters are dealing with.
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