It’s horror season, you guys!! I’m actually so excited. I’ve been collecting a list of horror movies that have already come out this year and I’ve saved them for the month of October. I’ll have to start with the ones that are more likely to lead to heavy spoilers, if I wait another second! So The Watchers, starring Dakota Fanning – what’s it all about?
As a pet shop employee, Mina (Dakota Fanning) is off through the Irish forest to deliver a parrot to a customer. But at a certain point, her car shorts out, and will not run anymore, just like her phone. She is forced to leg it, but it only takes steps for her to become completely disorientated through the fog and the trees. Along with ominous signs warning of death, Mina finds an older woman who beckons her into a box-shaped room, with a mirror on one side, and commands her to face it while these unknown creatures come at night to gather and stare. As absurd as it sounds, this is Mina’s life now, with no way out of the forest, and strict rules to follow to stay alive.
The Watchers is shot really well. This is Ishana Night Shyamalan’s directorial debut, daughter of M. Night, and we all know daddy definitely had the knack for creating beautiful movies back in the day, when we recall The Sixth Sense and Signs. This movie finds visually creative aways to promote theme and metaphor, and I always respect that. I personally don’t know many spooky forest movies – I know they exist, but I haven’t seen them (The Forest and The Ritual are two, right?), so even just the trees, and the idea that an eye or two could be peeping around from this tree trunk or the next, was enough to keep me wary. But if there’s a knock on The Watchers, it’s the content, and early on, this movie is building a lot of exposition through Mina talking to that parrot, and oh boy, it’s threatens to quickly hurdle down a Shyamalan’s worst road of uncanny valley, where the character’s actions don’t always live up to the style, and are, quite frankly, totally unrealistic – recall Frank Collison talking about hotdogs in The Happening, for the strangest example 🥴 I just didn’t think Mina was perky enough to pull off talking to a yellow-feathered friend for exposition; but I also thought the movie might be trying to make a point of substituting us in, the audience, as meta-watchers, in the place of the bird; but then I don’t know, and if that is the intention, then I think it’s done poorly.
The Watchers turn out to be an ancient mystical race of folklore to be known as the changelings, and as for the changeling’s design in this movie, it’s what? A little Slenderman, a little xenomorph, and they move like the blind death angels from A Quiet Place. They actually feel like exactly this, an amalgamation of so many horror movie monster elements we’ve seen before, including the thing, and so they’re not jaw-dropping original. But they do boast exciting lore – in that they were once peaceful, and then they were caged; now they watch to remember how to refigure in the hopes of rejoining our human society in secret. After our captives escape, (and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) is killed in a most displeasing way, resisting temptation from the changelings for the longest time until he doesn’t 🙄), I thought that Mina would go to the university and find a picture of Professor Kilmartin (John Lynch), along with his wife, who would look exactly the same as Madeline (Olwen Fouéré). And what happens?! 😱 100 points to Gryffindor! 1,000 points to Gryffindor? How many points do you think Dumbledore would give me for guessing a plot that big? 🧐 But unlike Challengers, where I got to a point where I totally saw the movie unfolding in front of me seconds ahead of the play, and thought it was perfect, this twist was obvious minutes out, and I was instead hoping the movie could still surprise me. How did I know? Because there’s always got to be a last-minute sting in the tail (tale) – I think the very notion forms the lining of a Shyamalan’s soul. But also, someone had to order that bird, didn’t they? That Mina clung to like the last package in Castaway. Although it’s never specified, it stands to reason that Madeline might’ve targeted certain people she wanted to come and live with her in the woods, via the computer in the hatch. People who fill a specific set of skills too, in hunting or homemade remedies, and those that are callous or cunning, like Mina, and perhaps who would be hardly missed. This would give the changelings more time to study those who could come to the forest and survive off the bare minimum 🤔 Although I might’ve been able to guess the prelude to the end, I did like how the movie finishes, with the changeling and Mina coming to an understanding, and Mina’s twin sister coming to visit. The movie’s efforts to bring a full circle of cathartic depth to Mina’s character arc is similar to what I once praised in Underwater, so I will again – yet while that movie was about facing life’s wild challenges, this one is about facing oneself, riding down that bumpy road to rediscover inner peace after making immoral mistakes.
I was wrapped to see Dakota Fanning. Missing for years, by my estimation, she showed up again in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood looking a little worse for ware, and for a while it seemed her sister Elle was to have the elegant, prolonged career that the older Fanning most definitely pioneered alone. But I like Dakota Fanning in movies, and if she is back, everything just feels right in the world 🤗
The Watchers is engaging, but not always interesting, so I do wonder how often my mind will drift back to The Watchers over the coming years. My guess is, not often. The characters, the monsters, the story, all do enough only to get the job done. So, as the first horror movie reviewed for this October 2024, there’s no doubt I was keen as a bean to have a good time, and I think that’s probably helped nudge me to boost my rating of The Watchers up half a star when I’ve been teetering on the edge. While the content is somewhat generic, I do think for a directorial debut, Ishana Night shows she is deft enough with her understanding of visual language, and I can see her finding some more stimulating material somewhere and making it greater. Welcome to the big leagues, Miss Shyamalan.
3.0
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