Warner Bros.
M. Night Shyamalan has been a household name for decades thanks to the Pennsylvania-based filmmaker carving out a niche for himself in the world of horror due to his love of plot twists. Apparently, the apple has not fallen far from the tree as far as M. Night’s daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan makes her directorial debut with supernatural thriller, The Watchers.
Also known as The Watched in some territories, the film centers around a young artist portrayed by Dakota Fanning, who finds herself trapped in an Irish forest due to seemingly supernatural forces preventing her from leaving.
As she wanders the woodland in search of a way out, the daylight eventually begins to fade, and an elderly woman (Olwen Fouéré) suddenly appears and beckons her to make haste and join her within a fortified building, lest our young lead wishes to encounter what lurks in the forest after dark.
What ensues is an otherworldly tale where unseen forces gather outside the shelter to watch the four humans within as they carry out mundane tasks, and the humans are only able to leave during the day to forage for food and try to find a way out of the forest.
In true Shyamalan style, the film is embroiled in mystery, and as the plot slowly unfolds, it becomes clear that as she grew up on her father’s film sets, Ishana Night Shyamalan paid attention to his filmmaking style, resulting in her debut feature feeling familiar without being derivative as such.
The visuals are well-crafted, just as the acting performance are all competent without being anything to write home about, and while the true nature of the narrative may not be the most original in and of itself once all is revealed, it nonetheless has a certain appeal, depending on what type of supernatural mystery tends to strike your fancy.
Where the film struggles, however, is in the pacing.
In spite of the runtime being a reasonable 102 minutes, the film feels overly long, dragging out a narrative that suffers from relying too heavily on mystery coming with built-in audience engagement rather than doing anything truly interesting with its characters and setting to keep the viewer invested.
The lack of engaging character development and unclear stakes and resolution inevitably makes the film a dull slog where good ideas are never enabled to fully form into great storytelling.
While the mystery in itself is not the issue here – as its full extent is kept intact well into the film – The Watchers ultimately does not succeed as a mystery, as the suspense of being kept in the dark as a viewer only works if the tension is sustained throughout, which it unfortunately is not, and the film instead stumbles over its own eagerness to be mysterious and falls short of being genuinely compelling.
Extras include featurettes and deleted scene.
The Watchers displays plenty of filmmaking merit, however, the needlessly meandering narrative severely subtracts from the overall impact of the film, making Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut promising in terms of her knack for the technical aspects of filmmaking, but underwhelming in terms of supernatural thrillers as a compelling genre, especially with the increased expectations a mystery directed by a Shyamalan automatically comes with.
Verdict: 5 out of 10.
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