The Watchers (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – A young artist gets stranded in an extensive, immaculate forest in western Ireland, where, after finding shelter, she becomes trapped alongside three strangers, stalked by mysterious creatures each night.

My Take – Known for employing mostly supernatural plots and mixing them with (polarizing) twist endings, M. Night Shyamalan is indeed an iconic filmmaker who has thrived (and seen his share of flops) in the industry for over two decades, with films like The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), The Visit (2015), and Split (2016) filling up his filmography.

But while we await with bated breath for his next release, Trap, which comes out in two months, his daughter, Ishana Night Shyamalan, makes her feature debut as a writer-director, following second unit director stints on Old (2021) and Knock at the Cabin (2023), and the helmer of a few episodes of the Apple TV+ series, Servant.

And as one could have expected, it adopts a supernatural plot, and just like most of her father’s works, is equal parts intriguing and frustrating.

Based on the 2022 novel of the same name by A. M. Shine, the film clearly showcases her understanding of suspense-building and willingness to experiment with genre tropes, yet, sadly, the wildly inconsistent pacing and somewhat underwhelming twist holds it back from reaching its full potential.

Initially recalling The Village (2004), which also saw characters forced to obey rules or risk the wrath of unseen monsters, here, director Ishana creates an amazing atmosphere and provides the necessary information to terrify, but for unknown reasons, she doesn’t seem to fully believe the strength of the lore as the story’s foundation.

Making the whole experience less disturbing than intended and less harrowing than hackneyed, right down to its final moments, which throws in a twist that would have landed better on a sturdier foundation.

The story follows Mina (Dakota Fanning), an American loner living in Ireland, glumly working at a pet store in her days and hooking up with strangers in the nights following. Some 15 years ago, she was in a car accident with her sister and her mother, which left the latter dead. Now, Mina does whatever she needs to do to numb the existential pain around her trauma.

After being sent on a trip to deliver a unique bird to a Belfast zoo, Mina finds herself stranded in the middle of a mysterious, tech-killing forest, with her phone and car dead within minutes.

After trying, and failing, to find a way out, she’s lured towards a lone bunker-like building, nicknamed ‘The Coop’, and meets it’s other occupants, Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) and Ciara (Georgina Campbell). Until recently, Ciara’s husband, John (Alistair Brammer), rounded out the group. But he went off in search of help, and hasn’t been back yet.

But safety is a fleeting concept here. As night falls, mysterious forces emerge, forcing the group to huddle behind a large, one-way window-the only barrier between them and the unseen watchers.

Without a doubt, the film provides an interesting premise at face value. Horror films that involve a twist on folk stories accompanied with an eerie location usually pair well together and in this case, it does mostly. The film’s greatest strength lies in its initial setup. The dense, uncharted forest evokes a sense of primal unease, and the concept of unseen entities lurking just beyond the window is undeniably creepy.

Here, director Ishana Night Shyamalan keeps the creatures shrouded in shadow for a good portion of the film, relying on suggestion and flickering lights to build tension. However, the film struggles to maintain its momentum. As the plot unfolds slowly, the long stretches of dialogue do little to develop the characters beyond their basic survival instincts.

But while the screenplay does a great job of setting up these rules with the fear of what might happen if the characters break the rules, it never delivers on what actually happens if a character breaks these rules.

To make matters worse, the film keeps throwing more plot at us without ever building suspense or doing anything particularly scary. We eventually learn what/who the watchers are, the film banks on the eeriness of the creatures, their unnaturally long figures, and their thirst for mimicking humans, studying them as though they’re an experiment they’re fascinated by. A lot of exposition is provided to fill out the backstory of what happened in the past and how they ended up in their current state.

But there are times when the film ends up focusing on so much lore that it forgets to be scary. There are also nods towards reality TV, social media, AI, colonialism and the inevitable horror buzzword trauma, but all they serve to do is make the inevitable last act reveal. But unlike some of her father’s more successful works, it doesn’t quite land here. It feels more like a desperate attempt to inject a jolt of surprise rather than a satisfying conclusion to the established themes.

Nevertheless, as a director Ishana Night Shyamalan shows promise and one can clearly see sprinkles of her father’s style embedded in the film but also boasts her own unique vision. Only if the writing was better.

Performance wise, Dakota Fanning delivers a compelling turn and is clearly invested in her character. Olwen Fouéré is once forced once again into the increasingly annoying role of genre oracle, very akin to the role she played Tarot (2024), another throwaway horror flick.

Oliver Finnegan brings in the necessary intensity, however, Georgina Campbell is underused in a thankless role. John Lynch is decent in a small role. On the whole, ‘The Watchers’ is a sub-par supernatural horror with an intriguing premise letdown by its uneven execution.