Don’t Watch 'The Watchers'

Ishana Night Shyamalan's feature writing/directing debut has all of her father's weaknesses and few of his strengths.

Given the current heightened focus on/hostility towards nepotism in the movie industry, there has never been a worse time for the offspring of a famous filmmaker to release a lousy movie. Cue the world’s tiniest violin, then, for Ishana Night Shyamalan, the 24-year-old daughter of M. Night Shyamalan: her feature writing/directing debut, The Watchers, is the kind of stupendously bad movie that seems destined to be completely forgotten at best and turned into a recurring punchline/cautionary tale at worst… especially ‘cause her dad produced it.

Based on a novel by A.M. Shine, The Watchers watches Mina (Dakota Fanning, delivering the year’s second-least emotive performance by an actor named Dakota), an American running away from her trauma by living in Galway (the exact details of that trauma are only revealed gradually, although you’ll likely figure them out long before they’re made explicit). She works at a pet shop, and is tasked, for reasons I honestly could not explain, with transporting a parrot to a zoo in Belfast.

Thus, Mina winds up driving through a mysterious forest that has somehow gone unmapped in a country the size of Maine, where her car breaks down and her phone stops working. Mina tries to find her way back to civilization on foot, but finds she cannot; the sun starts to set, and she gets the distinct feeling that something dangerous is out in the wilderness with her; finally, she’s saved at the last moment by a trio of people living in a one-room home in the middle of the woods. An entire wall of that home acts as a one-way mirror, through which, Mina quickly learns, the inhabitants are observed nightly by mysterious entities known only as… well, guess.

The Watchers are apparently sensitive to daylight, but it’s a moot point, because there’s no way to escape the forest before sundown regardless. And so Mina becomes part of this little makeshift family, which also consists of an older woman, Madeline (Olwen Fouere), a younger woman, Ciara (Georgina Campbell), and a young man, Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). Eventually, and for reasons that don’t make a whole lot of sense, the threat posed by the Watchers increases, and the quartet must risk their lives to leave the shelter behind as they try to find their way out of the woods.

Ishana, like David Cronenberg’s kids, isn’t afraid to embrace her family legacy: a high-concept horror thriller with a big late-story twist, The Watchers often feels like one of M. Night’s movies. Unfortunately, M. Night’s work is extremely hit-or-miss, and The Watchers has more in common with Old than The Sixth Sense: the threadbare characters behave inconsistently and often idiotically, the tone is needlessly sour, the themes are expressed in the most heavy-handed of manners, the plotting requires a Herculean suspension of disbelief, the structure is a mess, the pacing is inept, the mountainous heaps of exposition are clumsily delivered, and the big surprise near the end lands with all the impact of a feather. The Watchers is strongest when it’s oblique, which is rare; when it stops to clarify what’s actually going on, it raises so many practical logistical questions as to render itself laughable.

The Watchers kind of reminded me of Jordan Peele’s Us in that regard… except Peele is so talented, and his characters are so compelling, that Us remains engaging even as it over-explains itself. The characters in The Watchers are not compelling; by the end of the film, I felt like I had a better understanding of the stranger next to whom I was seated than I did of Daniel. Georgina’s defining characteristic is that she misses her husband; Madeline’s defining characteristic is her adherence to a set of rules designed to keep the Watchers happy (nobody ever asks Madeline how she came by these rules, which sure seems odd). Again, much like the characters in M. Night’s worst films, the cast of The Watchers often feels like it was conceived by someone who’s never actually met another human being before.

The Watchers is not a movie that’s so bad it’s good; it’s just bad. Consequently, Ishana’s career would likely stall, or maybe even outright end, if not for her familial get out of jail free card (her only previous professional experience comes from working on Servant, a television show that was also produced by her father). Hopefully, she uses her inevitable second chance to at least try and find her own creative identity. At least then, her work might someday prove worthy of analysis despite its flaws. The last thing the world needs is another bland, middle-of-the-road journeyman.