The Watchers: Where did that last act come from?

Rob Ryan

⭐⭐

The Watchers (Called The Watched over here) feels like two different but decent ideas for movies smashed into one. It's a good looking movie along a capable cast but man is this screenplay all over the place. I think the most telling part of all of this was the credits revealing that this in fact based on a novel. I have not read the book obviously but I would like to think that the concepts established in it lend themselves better in book form rather than a movie that's over an hour and a half in length.

Mina (Dakota Fanning) is an American living in Ireland who by day works at a pet shop and by night likes to go out pretending to be someone else to mask the person she actually is. One day she is given an assignment to take a small yellow Parakeet to Dublin to give to the Zoo. Rather than take a direct route via motorway which is what any normal and sensible person would do, she decides to let her sat-nav drive her through the Irish country side and she inevitably winds up getting lost in the forest, the car mysteriously breaks down as well as the navigation and as a result she's completely stranded. When she notices a sinister presence stalking her, she finds shelter in a big room with a huge wall of glass that can somehow act as a two way mirror and three other occupiers who like her got lost in the woods, There's Madeline (Olwen Fouéré) the eldest and the longest anyone has been here, Kiera (Georgina Campbell) who came here with her now absent boyfriend who ran off to find help and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) the most erratic of the group. Every night after sunset they stand and are watched and observed by of creatures who they call "The Watchers" who are extremely sensitive to light and would eat you alive if you went outside.

Escape is not an option, the woods have been mysteriously designed to keep you in a loop and if you ever step beyond the check points highlighting that these are "The Point of No Return" then you won't even be able to make it back to the cabin in time before the creatures eat you. This section is where the films, minimalism, tension building and horror should shine but rather than have any buildup to the dangers faced by the characters, the film makes it clear right away that something evil lurks and we have to stick to the rules otherwise your chances of survival are next to nothing, cancelling out any real sense of build up or dread. There are a few compelling plot points that don't go anywhere and are scrapped, Mina being new to this group of survivors is of course skeptical of what she's been told and even Daniel admits he has never seen any of these creatures himself, so how does he know what Madeline tells him is true, even if they are proven right about the dangers outside, there's still attempts at mutiny resulting in the months of isolation and lack of acceptance of their new reality that the movie scraps before it can properly be explored.

The Watchers instead is of course in the tired tradition of mainstream horror, another film about grief/trauma and characters with dark pasts who just can't to seem to move on. Wouldn't it be more compelling for once if the characters put in these terrifying situations where people who in some way accepted themselves, where happy in their own skin, had set goals for themselves and maybe loved themselves? Then at least, we can feel sympathy for them when the life they had is gone in an instant, we can be compelled to route for them to try and get their sense of normalcy back, I'm not saying they have to be perfect or not have personal problems, but at least there's an arc there that we can in someway identify with as opposed to watching this tired and overdone plot point unfold complete with constant monologuing and expositions followed by words of wisdom that feel like generic platitudes than anything. Not least by the fact that this is another one of those movies, where the only basis for two characters to form any kind of possible romance is for one of them to explain through exposition, a sad traumatic backstory and the other person to reciprocate or accept them, I'll leave you to guess what will happen to one of them a few scenes later.

The film at a certain point expands from the cabin and tries to include some mythology. This is where writer-director Ishana Shyamalan (yes M Nights Daughter) really looses focus as the movie tries to do too much with too little time left and as a result, leaves the viewer with more questions than answers. At the same time this is where the movie becomes more compelling and almost unpredictable, even if the dialogue is still very cheesy, the editing feels very haphazard and one of the twists you could see coming from miles away. The minimalist setting of the cabin combined with more big scale world building are two concepts that I feel would have worked if the movie had picked one off these ideas instead of trying both at the same time. As it is, everything in that last act feels rushed and nothing is given a proper and satisfying conclusion beyond "will Mina finally overcome that grief and guilt she's been feeling for so long?"

The Watchers is not a good movie but it's easy to see where it could have gone right. Had it had more of a grasp of what it wanted to be, had this material been adapted in a way that was more cohesive, had it maybe done away with that grief/trauma plot point or if the entire film was as enjoyably cheesy as that final act then it could have worked in some way. A small part off me kind of recommends it, if not for the story, characters or horror then at least the really clunky last act where it's at it's most enjoyable even if it's not entirely in the way the filmmakers intended.