Jonah Naplan   June 10, 2024

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter, Ishana, “The Watchers” is a jumbled and confused mess of a movie that tries to be a thriller, an allegory and a horror folktale all at the same time. The story is adapted from a book by A.M. Shine and is loaded with all sorts of potential for atmospheric tension, claustrophobia, and fantastical terror, but this film too often feels scared to completely commit to any one idea or hit a home run in any category. It’s not terrible. It’s also not very good. It’s simply a frustrating misfire that could have become a modern day classic in the vein of any one of Jordan Peele, Robert Eggers, or Ari Aster’s films, but instead feels a little bit like the weakest parts of Ishana’s father’s work in “Glass,” “Old,” and “The Village.”

The movie stars Dakota Fanning as a troubled woman named Mina living in Galway, Ireland. Mina doesn’t really have a purpose; she works at a pet store by day and cosplays at local bars by night. While transporting a bird named Darwin from Galway to Belfast, her car breaks down in the middle of the woods (and a generically scary prologue would inform the viewer that this is no normal setting), leaving her with nothing to do but yell for help. By nightfall, however, she’s encountered a mysterious but trustworthy woman named Madeleine (Olwen Fouere) who ushers her into a fortitudinous bunker dubbed “The Coop,” housing two of the only other souls alive in this wood. Each night, Madeleine, Ciara (Georgina Campbell), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) must line up single-file and stand still parallel to the massive one-way mirror that makes up one of the four walls of the Coop to be observed by the “Watchers,” a group of forest creatures of unknown appearance. These three unfortunate souls have been trapped in this position for months on end and Mina is about to join their traumatic fate, being that the infinite forest boasts absolutely zero escape. So, what to do?

From very early on in this story, Shyamalan proves she still has much to learn as a filmmaker, especially in the ways that a setting can assist in building out the particulars and tone of a narrative. Neither the Coop nor the dark forest it resides within demonstrate the thematic urgency to give “The Watchers” a compelling or, even better, a disturbing atmosphere. At best, they only solidify the idea that this set of characters is completely isolated from the rest of the world, rather than hammering home the point that they’re all trapped together. Opportunities for secluded madness are rarely taken, and the regulations of this setting are unclear, despite the fact that the rules are repeated over and over again by Madeleine, particularly in the context of another character breaking them. Are the woods alive? Do they force you to run around in circles for all eternity, or do they kill you? How come the characters seemingly can’t escape during the daytime even though the Watchers are only out and about during the night? Why is it that no one, not even any social media influencers, have managed to livestream their exploration of these woods, thus exposing their danger and ambiguity?

I could probably forgive these plotholes and inconsistencies if Shyamalan at least managed to land her overarching message. Through this web is an attempt at a metaphor about how we, as humans, feel as though we’re always being “watched” by strangers everywhere we go, and that those one hundred pairs of eyes are all tearing us apart and judging our every move. “The Watchers” demonstrates this maxim with little aplomb by revealing a tragic event from Mina’s childhood that she feels was entirely her fault, posing how that secret guilt has bottled up to the point of her personal vulnerability. This is a message, however, without a moral. It resolves itself merely by having one character confirm to another that they’re glad they’ve remained their true self. It’s basic. It lacks complexity. Sugar-coating is not spice.

Dakota Fanning is fine. She’s not the least interesting female protagonist of recent horror movies, but is certainly not the most interesting, either. Mostly, her character just exists to move the plot along from point A to point B. Where it all ends up is obnoxiously twisty and turny in classic Shyamalan fashion (it runs in the family, I guess?), but the surprise reveals foil themselves by over-explaining everything in the third act, ruining any opportunity the audience may have had to ruminate through the film on a second watch.

It’s also important to note, however, that in equally classic Shyamalan fashion, “The Watchers” does present a couple of decent tension-driven sequences mixed with a few good jumpscares and fake-outs. A sequence involving a surveillance camera set outside the Coop is particularly enthralling, and the scene where we finally get to see the Watchers in the light (come on now, like you thought we would never get to see them?) is chilling, even though the creatures sort of look like graphics out of a bad video game, which is probably the idea.

But for the most part, “The Watchers” is painfully mediocre, a film that Ishana Shyamalan will probably look back at decades from now and cringe at all the roads she could have taken. I do, however, have hope that she’ll learn from her mistakes and continue climbing towards a higher summit as her future directorial career nears ever closer on the horizon.

Now playing in theaters.