'The Watchers' Is Cheesy Like an M. Night Shyamalan Film
From M. Night Shyamalan's Daughter comes a film that has father's footprints all over it. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? A little bit of both, but mostly a bad thing. M. Night Shyamalan has had a rocky film career. Once at the top of his game with The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan has directed a series of mildly successful flicks to duds. There was a small resurgence of his work with Split, but it cut itself up with Glass. Depending on who you ask, Shyamalan's filmography may not be something to brag about. Yet his name is on every major poster for The Watchers in conjunction with his daughter, as if the audience is too stupid to figure out that Ishana Shyamalan is M Night's kid.
The Watchers feels like a mix of M. Night'sThe Village with Alex Garland's Annihilation. The spooks aren't very scary, and the end revelation is predictable more than it is profound or existential. The film is trying to be deep, but it's too silly to be taken seriously kind of like a lot of M. Night's films! It's like Ishana Shyamalan saw Solaris and decided she could make a horror version of that. That might not be entirely Shyamalan's fault as the movie is adapted from A.M. Shine's book that borrows a lot of horror conventions for itself. Most of the scares and lame story can be attributed to Shine's novel. It's not original; neither is it creative. The Watchers borrows too many other elements from other films, with some shots that look like they were ripped straight out of The Village. It's sometimes effective. Other times, it's poorly done. Ishana Shyamalan is trying to create a Jaws effect with her film, but when the big reveal comes, its CGI ruins the reveal of the monster.
The story starts with a man being chased in the woods with a corny narration, saying, "The forest swallows lost souls like a flame" or something like that. Then, we cut to Mina (Dakota Fanning) as she heads to the woods in Western Ireland. As soon as Mina arrives in the forest, her van disappears. Then, she begins to hear strange sounds. A woman opens the door to a bunker, giving Mina five seconds to run to safety. Once locked inside, Mina is stuck with a handful of other people. Together everyone is in a glass observation box where the watchers are monitoring them. Who are the Watchers, and why are they observing these people? That's for you to find out as the film ticks along. Sadly, the plot of The Watchers gets dumber later in its length.
The best way to describe the film is generic horror. A bunch of people are trapped inside a place they can't get out of. If they step outside at night, the monsters will get to them. We have a cast who's trapped—check. There are scary monsters—check. Our protagonist has a tragic back story she doesn't want to talk about—triple-check! I got horror movie cliche bingo! Some elements of the film work. For the first chunk of the movie, we don't see the Watchers. Instead, we rather hear them, letting our minds imagine what these beasts may look like. That gets flushed down the toilet later in the film when we see the ghouls fully lit. Why couldn't they have made the Watchers practical? It would have been way scarier than the CG mess we get here.
With a sloppy narrative that seems like it's been copied and pasted from other horror tales and an eye-rolling ending, The Watchers doesn't work. The only thing that did work was Dakota Fanning's performance. You don't see her often in movies, but when she shows up, she commands the screen. It's just too bad Fanning doesn't have a better script to work with. The Watchers is short, but it's a movie that keeps ending then restarting. It's meant to surprise us with the movie's big twist. Because if you know Shyamalan, they have to have a twist. By the time that twist comes, you'll be watching your watch more than The Watchers.
