Ishana Night Shyamalan has a bright future ahead of her. The recent NYU graduate has had a strong start in the film industry. Her father, M. Night Shyamalan, has worked in the industry for decades with his iconic work in The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Split. He brought her on to be a second unit director on his films Old and Knock at the Cabin, and she also wrote and directed a few episodes of the Apple TV+ show Servant. But it’s time for her to make her feature directorial debut with The Watchers, a perfectly decent new horror movie flying into theaters.
Shyamalan does a solid job crafting an eerie gothic atmosphere in The Watchers, differentiating her work from her father’s and quashing “nepo baby” claims. The premise surrounds Mina (Dakota Fanning), a young artist who gets stranded in the woods and trapped with three strangers who are watched by mysterious creatures at night. The film is based on a novel by A. M. Shine; one can only imagine what kind of pitch Shyamalan delivered to have her first movie be a wide-released Warner Bros. summer horror film.
The compelling premise that works well for a while. There is a specific set of rules that the characters must follow, such as never turning their back to the watchers, never opening the door after dark, and so on. The screenplay, which Shyamalan adapts from the novel, does a great job of setting up these rules with the fear of what might happen if the characters break the rules, but never delivers on what actually happens if a character breaks these rules.
The first half of The Watchers works quite well. This film thrives on the mystery of what’s happening. There are a few camera placements from Shyamalan and cinematographer Eli Arenson that sometimes allow us to feel like voyeurs. There’s a chilling opening horror scene, and the film does a strong job of crafting a haunting nature that permeates the frame, allowing fear to settle into its viewers.
The film works a bit less when trying to build the characters. For example, Mina talks to a parrot to reveal some exposition about where she is in her life and what happened in her past. But it’s very clear that the parrot is simply a stand-in for the audience. It also does not feel too important to have these scenes because, later in the film, we flash back to Mina’s backstory. We also don’t feel too connected to the characters she meets later in the film. There’s Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), an older, wise woman who first rescues Mina. It takes a while for us to learn about her, but when we do, it adds a lot of context.
There’s Ciara, played by Georgina Campbell, who you may recognize from her starring role in Barbarian. She’s an easy character to latch onto solely due to Campbell’s performance, but there isn’t much to her beyond that. And there’s Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), a naive character who goes on to do something reckless that endangers other characters. There isn’t enough motivation for him to do what he does here, and this continues towards the latter half of the movie. He’s an example of a character that deserved a lot more on the page to get us into his mind a little more.
The Watchers excels in its mystery, but it becomes a bit weaker when it begins to focus too much on providing answers for what we’re seeing. We eventually learn what/who the watchers are, and a lot of exposition is needed to fill out the backstory of what happened in the past and how we ended up here. There are times when the movie ends up focusing so much on the lore of these watchers that it forgets to be scary. This is particularly the case for the second half of the film, which, at one point, completely forgets that it’s a horror movie and feels more like a supernatural drama.
Perhaps that’s the biggest weakness in an otherwise competent horror film—it has so much lore that it forgets to be scary. The tension is there during some scenes but is also completely gone for other scenes. Had the film focused more on its horrifying thrills, it would have been a stronger movie. There are a few ingredients that could have been left in the cupboard, like a Love Island-esque reality TV show that we see snippets of throughout. However, The Watchers serves as an example of Ishana Night Shyamalan’s promising potential as a filmmaker.
SCORE: 6/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 6 equates to “Decent.” It fails to reach its full potential and is a run-of-the-mill experience.
Disclosure: ComingSoon attended a press screening for our The Watchers review.
