The Watchers: Another Shyamalan is Off to An Excellent Start Doing 'The Twist'
By Chris Knight
Rating: B+
A horror-thriller directed by a Shyamalan, but not M. Night Shyamalan? Now there’s a twist!
The writer/director of The Watchers is, in fact, Ishana Shyamalan, daughter of the famed director of The Sixth Sense. By coincidence, both she and that film were produced at around the same time.
Now she’s all grown up and directing her first movie, after cutting her teeth helming several episodes of the AppleTV+ series (and M. Night production) Servant.
Dakota Fanning in The Watchers.
The Watchers is not a perfect movie, but it is an excellent start, heralding the arrival of a bold new talent. I remember thinking the same thing about Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral a dozen years ago, with the realization that not only does the apple fall close to the tree, it does so with a satisfyingly pulpy splat.
Similarly, The Watchers, with its mix of Alex Garland’s Annihilation, TV’s Lost and Celtic folklore - not to mention an intriguing if imperfectly handled third-act twist - proves that this Shyamalan can concoct a decent nail-biter of a thriller with the best of them. If by “best of them” we mean “Dad.”
Dakota Fanning stars as Mina, whose work at a pet shop in Galway, Ireland, requires her to drive cross-country to deliver a rare parakeet. Alas, this leads her into a vast forest that, the opening narration tells us, “appears on no map.” GPS be damned — if your car radio starts showing runic symbols instead of FM stations, throw it into reverse while you still can.
Mina does not, and ends up lost in the deep, dark woods that have long been the backdrop for so many of humanity’s tales of terror. And little has changed over the millennia. Something in this forest is watching - and occasionally attacking - a trio of similarly lost souls played by Olwen Fouéré, Georgina Campbell and Oliver Finnegan.
They invite Mina to join them in a tiny concrete bunker they refer to as The Coop, where they spend their days watching an old Big Brother type series called Lair of Love on DVD, listening to 78s on the gramophone, and foraging for food. When night falls, they retreat inside and present themselves in front of a wall-sized one-way mirror, like a less sexy version of Lair of Love. Unseen entities observe and make gruesome noises from the other side.
Is it a spoiler to say that Things Are Not As They Seem? Probably not, but I wouldn’t want to reveal too much more about the dynamics of this bunker in the woods, except that there’s lovely degree of uncertainty about the whole situation. One character swears he knows exactly how many days he’s been there, while another speaks vaguely of months, and I was fully prepared for years to be passing unbeknownst by the woods-dwellers.
The actual denouement makes things more complicated before clearing them up again, which may annoy some viewers who prefer a tidy conclusion to a messy one. But a conclusion it is, and a decent one at that. I can’t wait for Ishana’s next project.
The Watchers. Directed by Ishana Shyamalan. Starring Dakota Fanning, Olwen Fouéré, and Georgina Campbell. Opens June 7 in cinemas.