The Watchers: Movie Review

Cast: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan
Director: Ishana Night Shyamalan

Mixing Irish folklore with mystery and horror proves to be a relatively fertile start for M. Night Shyamalan's daughter, who directs this adaptation of A M Shine's 2022 novel.

Fanning stars as Mina, a distant and disinterested woman who's asked to ferry a bird across Ireland for a client, but whose car abruptly stops in woods she heads through. Unable to make the car restart, Mina's forced to traipse through the woods and takes shelter inside a giant building called the Coop.

Inside are three other occupants, and among their number a de facto leader who explains the rules to Mina - chiefly that the Watchers come nightly and she must not disobey their rules...

The promise of The Watchers is there from the beginning.

A murky mix of mystery and a chilling atmosphere combine to make The Watchers an intriguing parable that hints at a subtext rather than ever really dropping enough hints to allow others to connect the dots.

From interesting framing techniques to minor cinematic flourishes such as anyone around Mina being clearly out of focus early on, Shyamalan proves to have a handle on what her career could be - even if she is disappointingly paddling in the same pool as her father. 

But an over-reliance on Fouéré's character, the de facto leader, spouting repeated amounts of exposition rob the film of some of its more obtuse elements and subsequently lead the movie more into the basic tropes of horror rather than am ambiguity which would have served proceedings greatly.

Fanning is perfectly fine as the grief-stricken Mina, who has shut down for years; her indifference shaped by trauma and sharpened by a desire to escape (probably from herself as well). But there's not quite the challenge needed to propel her into the stratosphere here - more a scripted desire to see her pulled back from leading the film.

Ultimately a sedentary pace means much of The Watchers forces you to over-examine some of the contrivances rather than being swept up in what's on screen - it's not a fatal flaw, but when the final raft of exposition flies heavily through the screen and the mystery is wrapped up, it feels like it struggles under its own weight.