The feature debut for Nickelodeon veterans Jay Lender and Micah Wright, They’re Watching is a well-executed horror film that pairs an enjoyable cinematographic style with a withering critique of the cable-reality-show-industrial-complex.
Although it was filmed in Romania, the movie is set in Moldova, a post-Soviet, Romanian-speaking country that gives the film an air of authenticity. The locale also provides some of the film’s humor, exploiting the viewing public’s ignorance of Moldova in much the way Borat exploited ignorance of Kazakhstan.
They’re Watching follows the crew of “Home Hunters Global,” a reality show about U.S. citizens buying homes abroad. After a brief preview of the coming gore, the film opens with a clip from the show introducing the Moldovan village and an isolated home in the nearby forest where the film takes place. The opening is what one expects from a real estate reality show. Fortunately, the film quickly takes us six months into the future as the show’s crew returns for a follow-up episode. Here the cinematography shifts, the crew’s cameras serving as the film’s point of view, a found footage maneuver that provides an intriguing framing device for the ensuing action.
Early scenes with the TV crew highlight both the film’s most entertaining and least successful elements. The crew members, Greg (David Alpay), Alex (Kris Lemche) and Sarah (Mia Faith) walk around the small Moldovan town shooting B-roll. The film’s effective cinematography is on full display here, as each crew member has a camera and perspective is passed around in intriguing permutations. The crew’s idle gossip and chatter seems genuine and builds backstory for each major character.
However, juvenile and outright offensive jokes saturate and spoil these moments. These jokes may be funny to those who have never lived in a rural area or the non-Anglophone world, but they are also Orientalizing. Moldova is not, in fact, stuck in the eighteenth century; a Moldovan can tweet while eating sushi and watching Jay Lender’s “Phineas and Ferb” much like a twenty-first century U.S. resident can. Unfortunately, the plot hinges on the supposed abnormality of the villagers’ religious views, which is a source of many of the failed jokes, meaning the distasteful humor has broader ramifications. This is an ahistorical and lazy portrayal of the area and its people, reliant on audience ignorance.
The film’s second half shifts from playful banter to increasingly fast-paced horror action as the ugly American crew, having alienated the villagers, end up stranded at a remote house in the forest. The foreshadowing of witches and backward villagers climaxes in a supernatural battle in the woods, with the terrified TV crew sprinting chaotically, their cameras still rolling. While relying on familiar horror tropes, the film uses these effectively enough to help viewers forget the offensive jokes. They’re Watching has enough rhetorical flourishes to overcome a terrible opening and distasteful humor, but at best film demands that the viewer shut off their brain.
