The Summer of Shyamalan starts off with a “meh.” The feature debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of M. Night Shyamalan is hitting theaters this weekend, and a major question remains. No, not “who are The Watchers,” but rather, should you watch The Watchers?
The straight forward answer is that The Watchers feels a lot like a mediocre Shyamalan movie. In this latter half of M. Night’s career, we’ve seen a fair amount of hit and miss. For every Split there’s an Old. He’s thankfully rebounded from his flop era, with The Last Airbender and After Earth. But he’s never reached the heights of The Sixth Sense or Signs. And here we see his daughter following in the footsteps of his current mid-movie era.
The Watchers closely follows the storyline of the novel by A.M. Shine that it’s based on. It centers on a young woman named Mina, who gets lost in a mysterious forest in Ireland, while on a business trip to deliver a bird. She ends up getting chased by a feral, unforeseen monster, and is rescued by an older woman named Madeline, who gives her sanctuary in a heavily fortified single room fortress. There she meets two other survivors also rescued by Madeline: a woman named Ciara, whose husband John went missing days prior, and a man named Daniel. The group spends months together attempting to uncover the truth behind who the predatory Watchers are, and to figure out how to escape the thicket of madness and murder.
The problem with The Watchers starts with the predictability in its over-eager desire to be unpredictable. I’m sure many will defend the twists here for simply following those in the novel. But when someone who has never read the novel knows exactly where this is going from the end of the first act, there’s something to be said about the failure in the delivery and the execution. Especially when pretending to be clever in its mystery. This is a lesson Ishana Night has failed to learn from her father. Sometimes a straightforward approach is stronger for storytelling than the attempt to shock the audience. Especially when the audience is already steps ahead of the film.
The other thing that hurts the film (and perhaps this is a symptom of the novel) is that, unfortunately, despite good performances from Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Oliver Finnegan, and Olwen Fouéré, their characters aren’t really likeable. Perhaps Campbell’s Ciara comes the closest given her innocence. But sadly it’s hard to get invested in these characters when they either make terrible decisions or act like jerks. The whole point of Fanning’s Mina is that she’s supposed to be selfish, and become better at the end, eventually, once she forgives herself for the accidental death of her mother (this trauma being a staple in these type of Shyamalan films). But the change never really seems to be the focus with her character. The actions these characters take against one another as the film progresses really makes them undesirable leads. And as a result you don’t really root for their rescue or salvation. In fact the one character you end up rooting for is the bird, Darwin. Admittedly the true hero of the movie.
The one thing about the film I did enjoy was that it explored a subgenre of folk horror that isn’t seen in most horror films: that of fantasy horror.
If you haven’t seen the film, I’m about to dive into heavy spoilers at this time, so feel free to leave and return to this review after seeing the movie.
Essentially, we and the characters, find out that The Watchers are essentially changelings or faeries from Irish folklore. That’s quite interesting, and the use of Irish mythology makes The Watchers a unique entry into folk horror. The world building and mythology around the war between faeries and humans is also a fun one, that reminded me a bit of the superior Guillermo Del Toro film, Hellboy II: The Golden Army. The other thing that made the film a bit more enjoyable than it had any right to be was that the creature design for The Watchers was actually intimidating. The looming inhuman silhouettes, and the disfigured and threatening claws brought a genuine sense of menace to the characters, making them memorable adversaries for, what is essentially, a creature feature.
And that’s the thing. If this whole movie was a straightforward creature feature, that would have made this an incredibly fun watch. But it has to twist the knife, pretending to be more clever than it actually is because that’s sort of what Shyamalan-produced movies tend to do. If nothing else, I would have hoped Ishana Night would have learned that with her father’s movies (particularly in recent years), the less one indulges in the mystery box element, the stronger the product.
Unfortunately, this is the type of repetitive movie where every three scenes of “horror” are met with heavy exposition dumps. It tells rather than shows. Characters stop the narrative to give backstories. The film will stop itself midway through to show us a collage of videos from John Lynch’s Professor Kilmartin, to give us long winded answers. If you’re going to make this a mystery, then that’s not the right way to deliver the answers. Granted, it sounds like that’s what happens in the book as well. But this was an opportunity for Ishana to do something more unique and less of a cop out.
There’s also a specific subplot from the novel that I don’t believe transitioned well on film, which is centered on the film’s final twist. There’s a natural narrative stopping point in the novel and the movie which would have closed the film in a satisfyingly enough way. However, readers of the novel criticized that beyond that stopping point, the story continues to a twist that’s unnecessary and somewhat pointless. This is something that could have easily been excised from the movie, which would have been a better decision for it, given the reception of the novel’s controversial ending. But it’s kept in the film, which unnecessarily extends the run time and adds a silly and unnecessary twist to the narrative. Whether or not this was kept in the film and the novel to allow for potential sequels to exist, is unknown. But frankly, I’m good without a sequel.
That being said, I can give The Watchers a fair amount of positive praise on the more technical aspects of the film. The film actually looks quite nice thanks to cinematographer, Eli Arenson. It helps that the greens of Ireland alongside the gloomy weather, showcase the beauty of Shyamalan’s shots, while setting us up for the darker tone of the film. Additionally the guttural sounds of The Watchers themselves are nightmare inducing. Ishana Night knows how to play with sounds and visuals in a way that teases the creatures to their scariest potential, and the movie is a bit more exciting thanks to that. She also knows how to build tension, which is something that clearly runs in their family. The only thing really missing to go along with this would be better characters and better execution with the story’s reveals.
Overall, it would have been nice to support Ishana Night Shyamalan’s first feature. Especially since there are so few POC female directors working in the horror genre today. And to be fair, The Watchers isn’t the most offensive or terrible horror film of the year, or even the past few months. It’s just unfortunately bland and a bit pretentious in how it tries to approach the mystery surrounding this story. And the performances from its talented cast are squandered on rather unlikable characters. However, there’s still some potential in Ishana Night as a filmmaker. And with a bit more time, experience, and openness to criticism, who knows? There’s a definite chance she could one day surpass the skills of her father M. Night. But for now, at least as far as The Watchers is concerned, today is not that day.
Overall Score: C
The Watchers is now playing in theaters.