Watching The Watchers, the ominous, sporadically spooky, and of course twisty first feature from Ishana Night Shyamalan (daughter of The Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan), is akin to seeing an apple fall not so very far from a tree. It was probably inevitable that a filmmaker who cut her teeth on the sets of Servant, Old, and Knock at the Cabin would pick up a few tricks from her famous father, a reigning (if often divisive) master of suspense. All the same, and for all its flaws, this supernatural thriller’s relatively classical construction shows the bright side of Hollywood’s historic generosity to nepo babies. At its best, the movie is a reminder that showbiz scions sometimes inherit a little creative mojo from their parents, alongside the big opportunities that (for better or worse) are their birthright.
The writer-director couldn’t have picked a project more in the family wheelhouse. Had The Watchers concealed its lineage as diligently as it conceals its secrets, audiences would still walk out with the name Shyamalan on their minds and breath. Adapted from a novel of the same name by A. M. Shine, the film takes place in a magical Irish forest, a Bermuda Triangle of land rather than sea that appears on no map. Here sits a single-room house colloquially referred to as The Coop: a panopticon through which a desperate quartet of strangers is observed each night, lining up before the two-way mirror that separates them from the skittering somethings keeping them imprisoned inside. Shyamalan lays out this dilemma with suitable efficiency, though the more detail-oriented might get hung up on unanswered questions like “Where does everyone sleep?”
The latest addition to the menagerie is Mina (Dakota Fanning), an artist carrying a birdcage, a sketchbook, and a lot of genre-mandated family baggage. (Those seeking to get ahead of the film’s big reveals need only to look for foreshadowing symbolism in that inventory.) Mina’s new cellmates include the twitchy, impulsive Daniel (Oliver Finnegan); the compliant Kira (Georgina Campbell), whose husband disappeared into the woods and never came back; and the eldest of the captives, Madeline (Olwen Fouéré). The makeshift leader of the group, Madeline strictly upholds the rules laid down by the unseen Watchers: never be outdoors after nightfall; never go poking around the deep burrows from which these nocturnal Peeping Toms emerge; never turn your back on the mirror. If you’re going to throw a lot of exposition at the audience, it helps to put it in the mouth of an actor, like Fouéré, with some presence and gravitas.
It’s fair to wonder, for a while anyway, if these monsters are really out there, or if they are what they appear to be. After all, a Shyamalan has pulled such rugs before, and elicited some major groans with the notorious truth of a rural community. The Watchers sometimes plays like a mash-up of M. Night’s The Village and the mystery-laced YA sensation The Maze Runner. Suspense and intrigue is what it has going for it: So long as Ishana keeps us in the literal and figurative dark, her film exerts a clammy hold. We strain to catch a glimpse of what’s lurking in the shadows – the force that keeps yanking bodies off screen. The eventual reveal is well-handled, getting around some imperfect visual effects through analog tricks of composition and limited vantage.
Alas, The Watchers doesn’t hold up to a lot of scrutiny. Its pleasures are mostly in the delaying of revelations, not in their uncovering. The more we learn, the less sense it all makes. Nitpickers will have a field day with the bogus logistics of Shine’s plot, a dense thicket of improbabilities and shaky motivations. Conceptually, this material cries out for an allegorical reading, and seems to hint at one via the lone source of entertainment in The Coop: a small television set equipped with DVD episodes of a close-quarters reality show called Lair of Love. Is that two-way mirror a form of screen, offering an unseen audience a nightly window into the lives of four strangers finding out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real? It’s perhaps a relief and a disappointment that Shyamalan doesn’t push the metaphor very hard.
She might have developed her characters better. The Watchers ultimately has more mythology than genuine drama: Its pressure-cooker scenario never simmers into a satisfying war of wills, because these wilderness convicts are closer to stick figures than multi-dimensional people. That goes, too, for Mina, a traumatic backstory in search of a personality. If there’s anything affecting in the heroine’s lingering, boilerplate grief over a dead parent, it’s for how it mirrors the parental anxieties the elder Shyamalan has increasingly foregrounded. Fanning does her part, too, acting mostly through the eyes – a skill she first fabulously exhibited in War of the Worlds, directed by a filmmaker whose own suspense contraptions cast a long shadow over the Shyamalan canon.
There are glimmers of real craft in Shyamalan's fledgling vision.
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The problem with puzzle thrillers is that they tend to live or die on the answers they provide. The Watchers is simply much more interesting before those arrive; the big picture will make you want to scatter the pieces again. Still, if the director hasn’t quite acquired her father’s idiosyncratic formal prowess, there are glimmers of real craft in her fledgling vision – signs that she could make something better than this passable mystery box of a movie. A few surprises, too, though that shouldn’t come as a shock: Blowing minds is the family business, after all.
Verdict
The first feature written and directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan, doesn't stray far from the twisty webs of intrigue and suspense weaved by her famous father. There’s plenty to admire in this mystery-box thriller about a group of strangers imprisoned by the eponymous, unseen woodland observers. If nothing else, Shyamalan has absorbed plenty of lessons about suspense and atmosphere from her time on the sets of like-minded movies like Knock at the Cabin. But the more The Watchers comes together, the less interesting it becomes. It’s a puzzle best left unsolved.
