The Watchers has an eerie, eye-catching central conceit that you just know is going to get less interesting with every bit of information that trickles out. That’s the difficult thing about this kind of setup: that the mystery is almost always going to be more compelling than the inevitable explanation. In this case, the major questions involve the nature of the forest in which four strangers have found themselves trapped, as well as the nature of the deadly creatures that inhabit it but that only emerge when it’s dark. The characters are safe at night so long as they stay inside a mysterious building, which has one wall that’s actually a two-way mirror in front of which the beings outside like to gather to study the ones inside. 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. She’s then urged to step forward, an act that’s greeted with uncanny applause from her viewers on the other side of the glass.
The Watchers, which was adapted from a novel by A.M. Shine, is the feature debut of writer and director Ishana Night Shyamalan, whose father, M., serves as a producer. 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. Regrettably, Shyamalan doesn’t take to heart the lesson that’s been imparted over and over again by works like her father’s The Village and shows like Lost, which is that it’s best to not just linger with the unknown for as long as possible — because every explanation represents a narrowing down of possibilities — but to understand that the answers are not the point. The Watchers doesn’t much care to exist in the scenario it presents, which is particularly disappointing given the fact that it’s essentially about being forced to star in a very niche TV series — something acknowledged by the fact that the only entertainment available to the stranded quartet is a DVD of a Big Brother–style program.
Shyamalan is willing to address the nitty-gritties of this situation enough to let us know that the characters pee in a bucket (another thing she has in common with her dad is a taste for clumsy expository dialogue). This is mentioned offhandedly by Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), the youngest member of the four — a not-entirely-stable guy who’s been in the cabin for the second-longest stretch after Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), the rule-keeper and general authority figure. But so many other details of having to share a small space with limited resources and no obvious route for escape are skimmed over. Wouldn’t these people reek after having gone for months without bathing or having access to changes of clothing? Are they not starving from having to subsist on crow meat and whatever the spacy Ciara (Georgina Campbell) can forage during the day, when they’re able to venture outside? Hell, with comfortable places to sleep at such a premium in the cabin, how is it that Mina is able to commandeer the lone sofa without an epic fight?
A long, circular panning shot that travels from Mina to some barely perceptible movements in the darkness outside showcases the creepy panopticon potential of their living situation. But The Watchers otherwise does a disappointing amount of telling rather than showing when it comes to the tedium and the tension of being cooped up and on display. It uses Mina’s voiceover and notebook drawing to paper over the passage of time, skipping forward to when the characters are squabbling and missing prime opportunities to give us more about who they are by how they interact. Instead, they’re signposted by their single-faceted pasts. Ciara is in denial about the fate of her husband, who tried to escape the woods six days before Mina’s arrival, while Daniel blurts out a late line about his father being an abusive drunk. Mina is worst of all, a high-schooler’s sketch of what a disaffected 20-something would look like. She vapes while working a retail job. Sometimes she puts on a wig and goes out to bars to lie about her identity to random men. Fanning expresses Mina’s disaffection by way of a listless monotone — rather than play the character, she comes across as doing her own half-hearted version of dress-up.
Shocking stuff this is not, but the movie nevertheless presents Mina as an anti-heroine, even if the eventual flashback to her tragic past is a truly garbage reveal — a real groaner. 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. It does the scary parts of these stories no favors to be married to the most hackneyed of emotional journeys, represented by single tears rolling down cheeks and calls that are ignored in favor of voicemails that can be dramatically replayed later. Not every figure in films like this one needs to be rendered with full psychological complexity, but when a horror movie rushes past a promising start in order to wallow in clichés, it feels as though it’s squandering a premise. And when that premise involves a reality show for supernatural beings, that really is a waste.
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