This Ireland-set horror offers little in the way of a good story
This time last year, my hometown of Galway, Ireland was abuzz. Famous actress Dakota Fanning was seen wandering our cobblestoned streets, holding a parrot in a birdcage. M. Night Shyamalan was spotted, too. People assumed that he was shooting his next movie here. As someone who has seen Unbreakable more times than I can count, the prospect excited me.
Unfortunately, a bit of digging revealed that this wasn’t his film, but his daughter’s. Ishana Night Shyamalan was directing a horror movie based on a novel called The Watchers. My interest pretty much dropped off there. I’m not trying to mean or overly dismissive, but this was a clear case of nepotism, and good horror films set and filmed in Ireland are the exception, not the rule (trust me).
Of course, I’m never actively rooting for a film to fail—it’s just that Ishana Night Shyamalan had more to prove than most in her feature debut, so I wasn’t getting my hopes up. The mild thrill of seeing Galway on the big screen was pretty much the only thing that got me into the cinema.
Who Watches The Watchers?
When Mina (Fanning), a lonely and despondent pet-shop worker, is stranded in the middle of a mysterious forest, she’s forced to take shelter in a bunker with three strangers who claim the forest is stalked by bloodthirsty creatures known only as ‘The Watchers’.
Let’s get one thing straight—being from Galway makes me ten times more critical of this movie than most. During the opening ten or fifteen minutes as Mina flitted about the city, I kept spotting inconsistencies in the geography that kept taking me out of the movie. I felt like of those New York City film critics who complain when movies try to fob off the L-Train for Lexington Avenue Express or whatever.
Let’s not hold that against the movie, though. So what if Mina’s journey from Galway to Belfast takes her through Connemara for some reason? Just because it makes no goddam sense doesn’t mean it should—
Okay. Deep breaths.
My biggest issue with the opening minutes really is the bizarre way the film tries to trap Mina in the woods. Getting her into a situation where she’s believably stranded should’ve been the writers’ main goal. Instead we’re presented with the totally odd situation where Mina has been asked to transport a parrot to Belfast—a journey that takes her directly through a spot in the magic forest that shuts down her car for no reason.
Does everyone driving from Galway to Belfast wind up stranded in the mysterious forest in this world? Why does her car break down? Does she get lost? Why does she need to transport this bird? None of these questions are answered, making the whole ordeal feel incredibly forced. Again and again The Watchers is either bending over backwards to justify itself or breezily gliding over gaps in the logic that, if lingered on, would totally break any immersion in the film.
Checking My Watch
You know how with most films the move into the second act is where things start to get really exciting? It’s when all of the set-up is over and now things can really begin. With The Watchers, this is the point where the movie completely grinds to a halt. There is simply nothing interesting about the bunker Mina winds up trapped in, or the people she’s trapped with.
Mostly, everyone’s just bored. They spend a lot of time watching a DVD of some kind of ‘Love Island’ rip-off. We watch them watching the DVD. If this is supposed to be some kind of meta-commentary on the film, I have no clue what it’s trying to convey. Our characters are dull, lifeless things. I’ll admit to not being overly familiar with Dakota Fanning’s recent work, but this performance is truly, truly, vapid. It’s not just her. All the performances are brutal here. The god-awful dialogue doesn’t help things, but still, it was hard to watch sometimes.
Every night, our characters are forced (by whom? ‘The rules’) to stand in front of the mirrored window in the bunker for the amusement of the Watchers outside. When they do this… nothing happens. And then they do it again. And then they talk about wanting to leave. And then they have dinner. And then they watch the DVD. And then they go to sleep. And then…
This being a horror movie, an important question is: ‘Is this movie scary?’ Credit where it’s due, the Watchers are creepy. I love the weird, clicking sound effects, and the way they remain obscured by darkness or low-quality video footage for most of the film. I feel like they steal a lot from the monsters from A Quiet Place, but still, they’re spine-tingling.
There’s also a strange and poorly executed attempt at a ‘Shyamalan Twist.’ Just in case you remain curious about the film, I won’t spoil what happens beyond the film’s midpoint, but things get so far off the rails and so poorly contrived that, at the very least, it becomes a more entertaining film, if only becomes so easy to snicker at—that is, after you endure the mild torture of the seemingly endless stream of ‘The Watchers: Explained’ videos our characters (and thus, the audience) are forced to sit through at the halfway mark. I literally laughed out loud in the cinema at the absurd length of this sequence and the complete lack of subtlety in how the film attempted to convey exposition to the audience.
Time’s Up
The Watchers is not worth your time. I hesitate to lay too much blame at Ishana Night Shyamalan’s feet, though. Despite being the sole writer and director, I can’t help but feel a strong sense of involvement from her father in the film, who was a producer. The Watchers feels like an echo of a lesser M. Night film, and while there’s nothing wrong with him taking a guiding role in the film’s development, I feel like his involvement might have robbed his daughter from creating something truly her own.
***
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