Mina (Dakota Fanning) is an artist with a troubled past living in Galway, an ocean away from her twin sister and the rash childhood decisions that haunt her. An ill-advised road trip sends her into a vast Irish forest, wherein her bright blue two-door vanishes and she’s left with a mostly silent, occasionally wise-cracking parakeet to face the evil forces lurking in the shadows. A seen-it-all older woman named Madeline (Olwen Fouéré) soon ushers Mina and the bird into a safe house, where fellow stranded travelers Ciara (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) bring her up to speed on their involuntary new lifestyle: they can only venture outside the bunker in the daylight, because nightfall brings ghouls who come to spectate on the humans through the large pane of glass that makes up one wall, and would kill them if not for their shielded shelter.
Why the abrupt dive right into an information dump? We’re just following the lead of the new folk horror film The Watchers, which begins inundating you with over-explained exposition from minute one via narration from Fanning. At too many points in the film, which is the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan — yes, daughter of M. — the action grinds to a halt so an actor can read off a long explanation of a fable or legend, or perhaps a recollection from their past that’s supposed to neatly clue us into their personhood. Though clunkily presented, the lore holds some power, but the psychologizing is surface level and the characterizations lazy and threadbare — these people don’t feel real, aren’t vivid even in a cartoonish way and are inert presences, despite the noble efforts of Campbell and especially Fanning, who is expressive and compelling here despite what the screenplay is giving her.
Not only is The Watchers awash in rationalizing monologues, it’s poorly paced. It feels like Shyamalan is trying to craft a lean, lithe thrill delivery system, as the film runs 100 minutes and hurries us along into the narrative. But the new filmmaker’s faculties don’t yet include scene-to-scene rhythm or moment-to-moment tension. We’re suddenly embroiled in the central mystery without really having a grasp on our characters or environment, and in its final stretch, the film seems to be ending (not satisfyingly) and then just keeps going, without finding a good landing place, despite there being a number of interesting ways you could conclude this story. An actually chilling sequence crops up about midway through, involving Ciara’s dead husband John, and it throws into sharp relief how flat everything that comes before and after was/is.
And this is perhaps the cardinal sin of The Watchers: it doesn’t push anything into truly absurd or terrifying extremes. In other terms, it doesn’t beg the “is this great or terrible?” question that Shyamalan’s father’s films often incite. But there are glimmers. Due to the nature of the voyeuristic monsters in the woods, the director gets some mileage of doubling imagery. This is seemingly echoed by the movie’s most eccentric element, which is the one TV show the group has access to in the cabin refuge: a dating series called Lair of Love that’s clearly modeled after Love Island but plays like an unsettling alternate universe recreation of that show; the mannerisms of the contestants are just a little too ridiculous, the tenor of the program eerily uncanny valley. Such a choice works to infect The Watchers, in its best moments, with a sense that anyone could be masking something sinister beneath the surface, or more intriguing still, that perhaps everything we’re watching is taking place on a different plane of reality from our own. Unfortunately, these threads and those about ancient legends or humanity’s fear of itself or creating a bridge between the holy and the natural never quite cohere and we’re left with miscellaneous unrealized potential.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
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