Personally speaking, I’ve never been one to cry nepotism when it comes to the children of famous filmmakers taking flight on their own. If I did, we wouldn’t have the works of Sofia Coppola, Brandon Cronenberg or Rob Reiner to enjoy, but you have to imagine there must be a certain amount of pressure when they choose to step out of the shadow of their parent and go it alone.
It’s with this in mind that we approach The Watchers (or The Watched, depending on which territory you see it in), the feature debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, who has chosen to make her first film very much in the vein of her twist-loving father. However, while M. Night Shyamalan may be famous for slow burn mysteries and gasp inducing twists, even he has become famously inconsistent in delivering a trippy plot that doesn’t collapse in on itself by the end. Can Ishana invoke the feel of early Shyamalan without drifting into the misty mire if his Lady In The Water phase?
Watch and see…
Mina is an American living in Ireland whose accumulated mental baggage has taken its toll. Even though it’s been fifteen years since her mother died in a car crash, Mina feels responsible to the point where she’s shut out her own twin sister as she goes out to pull men in the guise of made up characters in an effort to feel anything. However, when she’s tasked by her pet shop boss to deliver a parrot to a buyer, Mina finds herself stranded in the middle of a dense forest when her car suddenly dies and after a brief wander through the imposing trees, she comes across Madeleine, an old woman who urges the American to follow her as the sun rapidly sinks.
Mina takes refuge in a strange, concrete structure that has one-way glass on the front and addition to Madeleine, the place that’s known as “The Coop” also contains Ciara (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell), a young wife whose husband went off to find help and Daniel, a jittery young man. Soon Mina is given the rather alarming lay of the land and a bunch of rulrs to follow – every night, the quartet have to remain inside the Coop the moment night falls while mysterious beings that lurk in the forest gather to watch them for unknown reasons. If they’re caught outside, they’ll be ripped limb from limb by the unseen creatures who seemingly have all the resistance to the sun’s rays as a ginger goth in Magaluf. However, while Madeleine attempts to keep order, Mina’s habit of wanting to break the rules soon comes to the fore and as she tests the limits of the boundaries that these “Watchers” have set, matters soon get incredibly dangerous. But as the quartet vow to make a break for it before the patience of the Watchers run out, a string of twists gradually reveal that (no durr) things aren’t quite what they seem.
So, to really get to the meat of what bothered me about The Watchers, I’m going to have to enter spoiler territory a bit, so if you have a strong wish to see if Shyamalan’s brood has some of her father’s moxie, by all means go right ahead. However, while Ishana has certainly inherited her father’s talent for creating vastly atmospheric situations that have you itching to find out what it all means, she’s also got him that infuriating habit of not quite bringing the story home in a way that’s totally satisfying.
There’s been a fair few movies concerning various, Celtic beasties unleashing their dark fantasy fuckery upon random newcomers, such as Corin Hardy’s The Hallow, Lee Cronin’s The Hole In The Ground or even Jon Wright’s Unwelcome; but while these three movies took a harder stance on Red Caps, Faeries or whatever her hell those twiggy bastards were in The Hallow, The Watchers take a slightly more whimsical view at the fanatical folk that live in the dark recesses of the woods. Don’t get me wrong, Shyamalan makes great use of sound in order to build up a sufficient amount of tension whenever these beasties are around and her visual style, which utilises reflection, gloom and long, slow takes are certainly a chip off the old block. However, when it comes to explaining this bizarre and unsettling scenario away, the director seems far more comfortable with offering questions than providing answers.
The build up is great as the fact that nothing makes sense only heightens the unnerving nature of the setup. Why is this structure here? How did these people arrive? Why is the only mental stimulation in the place a DVD of one of those Love Island style show? It’s all incredibly intriguing and the addition of gangly-limbed forrest dwellers makes things genuinely unnerving at times. However, once we pass the halfway point, the explanations come thick and fast and while some of them manage to create even more gripping scenarios, some of them only succeed in unleashing floods of ungainy exposition that sees an overworked Olwen Fouéré deliver more instructions and advice than a self help manual. Elsewhere, the movie frequently outsmarts itself by including weird plot holes that are belatedly filled in to retroactively explain things that just don’t make sense. Take Fouéré’s rather strange and mildly irritating delivery which make you actively suspicious of the fact that she seemingly knows everything. Yes, it’s explained in a way that presumably is meant to play better once you know a certain twist, but all it actually succeeds in doing is telegraph exactly where a twist is coming from which allowed me to predict a healthy number of them a good ten minutes before they even occured.
By the time we’ve headed into the final act, the film has become another story entirely that seems dead set on resolving its plot threads despite the fact that it unravels all the hard work accomplished setting it all up.
Dakota Fanning reliably delivers the kind of haunted, wide-eyed performance that this sort of dark, adult, fairy tale usually requires and even though I’ve already mentioned that Fouéré struggles against the tide of exposition, she’s fast becoming the go-to actress for snow-haired, mature women who teeter on the edge of otherworldly shit. Similarly, the faerie folk themselves, while a tad over-produced with decent CGI and creepy enough, aren’t a patch on the creatures from those other, Ireland-set creature features I mentioned earlier.
From a visual standpoint, Ishana Night Shyamalan is still a talent to watch thanks to her firm grasp of creep inducing atmosphere, but if she ever wants to taken seriously as a filmmaker in her own right, she’s going to have to learn to stick the landing a little better before we continue to watch this space.
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