
Among kooky, creative thrillers, one name that is enough to call it all is Shyamalan. However, whilst it is M. Night who is the existing standard bearer of the name, his daughter Ishana hopes to take this legacy into the next generation and repeat the success. With events from A.M. Shine and ”The Watchers”, Ishana Night Shyamalan makes her debut as a director with an ambitious yet tale that seeks to blend the fantastical with the horrifying but ends up lacking in polish.
Mina (Dakota Fanning) is a lost cause bum, to put it bluntly. The Galway-based pet shop staff is twentysomething American by the day and an angry cosplayer by the night. After her motor vehicle gets stuck in the heart of an impenetrable forest with no clear objectives, Mina naturally initiates the hunt for rescuers. She finds herself standing alone at least it seems so when dusk comes and the avian population of the woods is set in the panic springing up from their rest. The woods turn into this creepy feeling with a growl and the feeling of something being there with the hunted. Cut off from her vehicle, Mina’s got no choice but to start running, eventually coming across a woman named Madeleine (Olwen Fouere) standing at the door of what seems like a small bunker. Madeleine assists in bringing Mina inside the bunker.
Also in this bunker, which they call “The Coop,” are Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). The coop consists of the other three walls and the large wall which is an opaque window for them and a peephole for the animals in the woods, the named viewers. Every evening, the team steps to them like store mannequins that are on display.
Madeline, Ciara, and Daniel have reportedly been confined within the forest’s edges for months. Due to the forest’s cylindrical structure and infinite thickness, a way out becomes difficult even in the mid noon sun. Their lives, including now Mina’s, depend on a few rules. The most crucial ones are be back in the coop before dusk and make it in time to welcome the watchers. The day is not a worry. Night however is, and if these rules are constant violations, deals with such breaches are to be terminated brutally, and savagely.
Shyamalan is in over her head with “The Watchers”. As far as the world-building, set pieces, and character development go there is much to work with in the source material, but Shyamalan leaves her toolkit at home. Creative vision and guts have been missing from “The Watchers”, and a sexy but inept script was the only asset to lean on. With dull and clichéd lines of dialogue all around and half-hearted attempts to preserve the genre boundaries, it fails to find a proper foothold and figure out its audience. Even though the character of Madeleine keeps on repeating how the emotion of the watchers is one of brutal aggression and violence in her eyes, the film does not have the resources to sell that idea. It’s toothless. The stylistic choices are a crash jerk or disjointed amalgamation of the zany cartoon over-the-top family horror of ‘The Haunted Mansion’ and some ultra-violent James Wan-style scenes more akin to Insidious. It is safe to say, Shyamalan does best when mystical imagery is involved, however ee, it is hard to ignore the idea that she was given a kitchen sink and told to go wild and this just cheapens the film as well, “The Watchers” is flimsy in the end.
The actual design of the forest creatures is quite compelling in the dark.
Mysterious shifting shadows and partial figures create an effective nocturnal atmosphere and add to the fear factor, but as is often the case with Shyamalan, he makes an error in judgment by exposing them to daylight and masking the horror within an all too familiar aesthetic. The only case here is when the watchers get fairly close to their final shape and are in the quite disturbing and yet quite vendible uncanny valley stage.
“THE WATCHERS” revolves around two very important concepts that of reproduction, and the act of watching others. From Mina’s (almost mentioned) twin sister to the repeating parrot from the pet shop she carries around during the movie to the mythology of the watchers, Shyamalan is an excellent example of how to integrate themes of separateness in the same space of evolutionary theory. The coop is in that sense a simplified theatrical set and one DVD that the group has is ‘The Lair of Love’ season one, which is an obvious spoof of ‘Love Island’. That such a comparison of a captive group living together in order to be seen for someone else’s amusement is obvious, the conclusion is so.
It’s possible that Shyamalan is being meta about the performance of the coop as a critique of the performative actions and soundbites cultivated by reality television or celebrity culture, but since her pen is rather thin, this remains more of a speculation than an address.
Certainly, the performances in “The Watchers” are hampered by a poorly written screenplay, compounded by some erratic line deliveries. Everywhere we go, as we make mental notes on the origin of the watchers, even the characters are puzzled at how they speak this particular line. The exposition-heavy dialogue tries to tackle the idea of all characters having a ‘pov’ kind of voice which leaves very little for the actors to interpret. Fanning does justice to the fact that Mina is quite hollow and void of much anger while maintaining an apparently stern demeanor interjecting her trauma however when the scene calls for intensity and desperation she disappoints. Campbell who seems to be finding her niche in horror with “Barbarian,” “Black Mirror,” and “Bird Box” is probably the best watched given that she hardly speaks and it is probably the reason why she does not.
“The Watchers” has an unfriendly pacing style as it constantly forces the viewer to engage with world-building, long dialogues, and an Oedipus-sized narrative. Shyamalan is indecisive about the kind of story being told is it a fairytale or horror, this fundamental flaw does justice to the film or rather wastes a big opportunity. There are notions and even elements of depth but they are quite fragile in the final cut. In short, the film “The Watchers” holds your curiosity but never quenches, the reason being it is a combination of a bold vision, but quite elementary execution.
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