Shyamalan lite when horror needs to be dark

14 Jun 2024

The flaming torch lighting the way of the horror film genre has been passed to another Shyamalan. The Watchers, from Ishana Night Shyamalan, pits Dakota Fanning against sinister voyeuristic beings in an ancient Irish forest.

It’s hard to talk about The Watchers, the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, without mentioning her filmmaking pedigree.

As the daughter of famed director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs, Knock at the Cabin), there’s a level of expectation that comes attached to the name. And perhaps even more so given that her father takes the producer credit.

However, it’s very much Ishana’s movie, with her taking both the writer and director credits on this dark, folklore-infused horror tale.

The Watchers was adapted from a 2022 novel of the same name by Irish horror writer, AM Shine. So will there be a trademark Shyamalan twist? Or is Ishana just another Hollywood nepo baby?

In The Watchers, Dakota Fanning plays Mina, a 28-year-old American artist working in a pet store in Ireland. During a road trip to deliver a bird to a customer, Mina gets stranded in an ominous forest after her car and phone stop working.

She is rescued by Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), who whisks her away to the safety of the Coop – a structure in the heart of the forest made up of one room and a wall of windows.

There, Mina meets two others who are similarly stranded – Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). All four are expected to stand in front of the windows to be watched by supernatural creatures that stalk the forest after dark.

Madeline lays out the ground rules for survival: be back in the Coop by sunset, never open the door at night, never turn your back on the windows, and never explore the burrows in the forest, lest the Watchers snatch you.

Mina goes along with the rules while plotting her escape from the Coop and her fellow “inmates” who become increasingly unhinged.

The first part of The Watchers is beautifully filmed, with the forbidding forest a constant, threatening presence. It is thoughtful in terms of cinematography, with clever and striking use of focus and mirror shots. Unfortunately, there’s not much else that The Watchers has going for it.

The acting is surprisingly wooden, with stilted dialogue delivered by characters who seem wholly disconnected from what’s going on.

Plenty of human drama can be milked from an impossible situation in which four strangers are trapped, but none of the captives, including Mina, seem to talk about anything of import. It’s all mostly awkward exposition. If an audience isn’t invested in a character and doesn’t particularly care if they live or die, you’ve lost the battle as a director. Most of the time, viewers will simply wonder about the plot holes, of which there are plenty.

By the time the third act attempts to provide some answers, which only serves to raise more questions, one quickly grows frustrated.

The premise of who the mysterious Watchers are and insight into their motivations would have been compelling if that had been seeded earlier in the film. Instead, the big reveal (which consists of several other, smaller reveals), happens too late for the audience to care much.

Together, it creates the impression of two films that have been poorly stitched together.

On the one hand, there is a compelling human horror story of claustrophobic confinement. On the other, there’s a dark fairy tale of scary creatures roaming the woods. Neither of these narratives live up to their potential, and neither are particularly frightening.

It may look dark and atmospheric, but The Watchers lacks any sense of underlying dread or urgency; essential for any decent horror film. It might be unfair to compare Ishana Night Shyamalan’s work with that of her father, as she’s only starting in her career, but since they share a genre and a name, the comparison is impossible to avoid.

If one had to place The Watchers on a Shyamalan quality scale, it is closer to the muddled and poorly acted Old than, say, The Village, and a far cry from compelling, character-driven films like Signs and Split. DM

The Watchers is in cinemas on 7 June 2024.

This article was first published on PFangirl.

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