Half the time I’m looking at movies to review at our local theater and come across something I hadn’t ever heard of before.
Such was the case for “The Watchers” – a movie that I’d never heard of at all until a few friends asked for me to review it.
I can say that all the hate it’s getting from national critics is well-founded and I didn’t know it was based on a book of the same name by A.M. Shine until the time of this column.
Outside of that, I found it relying heavily on jump scares and being shot far too dark to make things properly creepy.
For me, it’s one thing to be scared of the dark as a plot point, but a whole other flipside is that if I’m squinting in a shadowed theater at some ambiguous shapes in a dark forest – the latter being I’m more annoyed than frightened and the movie misses the mark by making me work harder.
Watchers is an American supernatural horror film written and directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan in her directorial debut and produced by her father M. Night Shyamalan.
It stars Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouere, Alistair Brammer, John Lynch, and Oliver Finnegan.
The movie is rated PG-13 for violence, terror, and some thematic elements and is 102 minutes long.
Mina (Fanning), is an American immigrant working in a pet shop in Galway, Ireland, while she struggles to come to terms with the death of her mother.
She feels guilty for her mother’s death and is estranged from her twin sister Lucy.
Mina’s boss tasks her with delivering a valuable parrot to a zoo in Belfast.
En route, her car breaks down, stranding her in a forest where she ends up naming the parrot Darwin.
She follows an old woman, Madeline (Fouéré) to a bunker-like building nicknamed ‘The Coop’, and meets two other occupants, Ciara (Campbell) and Daniel (Finnegan).
Madeline explains that mysterious entities called ‘The Watchers’ observe the group through the mirrored window of the Coop every night.
Madeline explains the rules to Mina: at night the Watchers kill anyone outside the Coop, and nobody must enter the Burrows, the subterranean tunnels where the Watchers retreat during the day because of their aversion to sunlight.
The group has been stranded in the forest for several months without encountering a Watcher and recently Ciara’s husband John (Brammer) left the Coop days ago, but has not returned.
Daniel helps Mina explore a Burrow where she unearths several items like a camcorder and narrowly escapes a Watcher.
That night, John appears at the Coop, but Madeline refuses to let him in.
When “John” fails to correctly verify himself to Ciara, he appears to be dragged away by the Watchers.
The Watchers then crack the viewing mirror which motivates Madeline to return the items to the Burrow to appease them.
As winter falls, the group begins to turn hostile against one another – plus things degrade further with the Watchers, too.
While the audience isn’t given exact times and dates for the events happening, it doesn’t make the movie’s flow any less frustrating to follow.
But, I suppose that might be the entire point, and can say that it’s just another mark against this flick for me.
Overall, don’t waste your time trying to catch this on the big screen – it won’t help you see anything better and drowns out the concept of the story.
