For its first 45-odd minutes, Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers seems like it could be executed as competently as one of the similarly high-concept thrillers her father has directed or produced. It’s as if you were to mix Devil, one of the more forgotten Shyamalan-as-producer efforts, with one of his modern films like Split or Knock at the Cabin – strangers, isolated together, at the mercy of some psychotic and oft-unknowable force, observed like rats in a cage. And sure enough, whatever has trapped these four people in a small concrete hovel in a portal-to-nowhere in the middle of one of Ireland’s forests is watching them, though the subjects never see them through the giant two-way mirror erected as one of the main walls of their little shack. They hear their observers’ pleasure (they clap when one, an airy university professor played by Georgina Campbell, dances to theremin music for their pleasure), and they feel their rage and disgust when one of them strays from the assigned rules – always face the mirror, never stay outside after dark, etc.
In short, it’s a moderately compelling riff on No Exit, or I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream, with the added bluntness of a Black Mirror metaphor in the giant screen in which our leads are forced to perform to a group of what initially seems to be faceless howler monkeys. For whatever reason, I thought the ”Watchers” were going to be giant rabbits – perhaps because of the burrows they hide out in or just since it would have been spectacularly funny – but Shyamalan continues a proud, if not entirely accurate in most cases, tradition in fumbling the reveal of what exactly is happening to these people and why.
Even though it’s based on a novel by A.M. Shine, it feels like Shyamalan spent a decent amount of time collect-calling a dial-a-cliché hotline. Our protagonist, a disaffected and alienated American in Ireland named Mina (Dakota Fanning), is one-dimensional to a fault. Everything about her character, from her lack of identity to her desires to escape herself (such as when she dons a wig to meet up with random Irishmen in bars, pretending she’s someone she’s not), feels fully contrived, an alienated and anhedonic state that we see basically each week when another new serious-minded horror picture comes out. Shyamalan does her best to give her some sort of personality in the form of a parrot, whom she’s tasked with taking from the pet store she works at to a zoo across a forest-covered mountain pass and who doles out droll repetitions about how she’s going to die, but the fact remains that she’s as fundamentally featureless as a freshly cut and pre-decorated cookie. Hell, she’d probably be a digestive, given that she’s mainly just meant to help everything else go down easily enough, her lack of personality serving as a way to expedite the proceedings. Once she’s lured into the woods and out of her car – it just stops, the electricity seemingly snatched from it – she finds she can’t get out. The road where she left her car is suddenly gone (and good thing she decided to take the parrot with her), the day is fading, and all of the creepy shit in the woods is starting to eat away at her.
But just before sunset, she sees an older woman, Madeline (the accomplished Irish stage actor Olwen Fouéré), running through the woods. She somewhat haltingly allows her into the little shack with the two other captives: the aforementioned professor (Campbell) and a young man (Oliver Finnegan) who got lost with his mom months ago, and they present themselves to “the watchers,” whom none of the shack’s inhabitants have ever actually seen. Mina’s both terrified (as one would be when they hear random and unnatural noises emanating behind a giant two-way mirror in the middle of horror Brigadoon) and suspicious. Madeline’s the leader of the group simply because she’s been there the longest of all of them and knows how to survive these dangerous situations. She’s also, aside from Mina, the one who has the fewest attachments – everyone else has someone they’ve lost in the woods, be it the professor’s husband (whose failed escape attempt opens the film) or the boy’s mom – so she has leverage. But Mina simply wants to get the fuck out of there and isn’t waiting for someone else to show up. So she begins breaking the rules – investigating the burrows that the Watchers spend their daylight hours in – and causing all sorts of havoc for the three there, all while challenging Madeline’s authority. This puts them in a pickle, especially when Mina discovers that the older woman might have lied to them the whole time about the reasons she’s in the forest in the first place, and that there might be a deeper history as to why this little patch of paranormal land exists.
It’s normally a pretty dumb thing to bitch about the stupidity of characters in a horror movie – like, let’s be real, most of us would be mincemeat if we were ever confronted by an axe-wielding psycho without any real training or experience, much less a giant supernatural plot of land haunted by the physical manifestations of Irish folklore – but man, these are some dumb, dumb people. Much of the fourth-act revelations that explain exactly what the hell is happening hinge upon a single rug being moved, which, somehow, never even got snagged on a shoe or something in the course of the months and months in which these people have been trapped in this tiny room. They have power, but no visible generator outside, so surely there must be someplace underneath it all, right?
The boy even says as much before he’s promptly ignored by all in favor of… watching a live feed from a jerry-rigged video camera that Mina finds in one of the burrows, as if seeing what’s outside is somehow more important than potentially discovering a way out – even with all the information they’ve gleaned about how once people leave, they don’t seem to come back. Surely it’s something pretty deadly making all of those noises, huh? But even in these would-be horrific moments – the first grainy footage of a “watcher” – Shyamalan can’t quite execute it right. Imagine the aliens in Signs being revealed to us for the first time on video, but instead of scary bug-men, it’s just… a skinny white dude’s pale legs, rendered even more fluorescent by the high-contrast grayscale. And don’t even get me started on the ultimate reveal about what the Watchers are, which smashes head-on into an American audience’s cultural understanding of much-scarier-in-practice folklore. I would be astonished if your average AMC audience doesn’t howl with laughter once revealed, especially with the breathless terror endowing the word.
This is ultimately the problem with The Watchers – it is fundamentally undermined by the goofiness of its premise. Shyamalan just doesn’t have the experience to fully and confidently roll with it (even as her direction is accomplished enough to make the film thoroughly watchable up until a point), having to conceal its true nature behind a bevy of twists and turns. She’s much better suited to that first section, in which we’re dealing with the sticky ambiguity of the situation. Perhaps a stronger film might have just done what any number of other adaptations did in the past when confronted by a strong conceit rendered inert by a dumb reveal: Jettisoned it like the septic storage on a Dave Matthews tour bus. At least it’d run cleaner and a little faster that way, even if it was shitting on the roads it took to the screen. But it’s forced to wind through those paths, as constipated and silly as they are, to an underwhelming and thunderously silly conclusion.