The Original novel from A.M. Shine is now available.
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With the debut of Ishina Night Shyamalan I was hopeful that we would get a bold new voice for the genre film. Instead, she offers up a lukewarm, barely edible movie that fails as cinema, and failed as a movie you cam just use it as a means of killing time on a boring Sunday. You won’t kill time, but you might just doze off every now and then, thanks to its almost pride in tedium and dullness. For almost a ninety minutes movie, Shyamalan’s movie is painfully uneven in tone and pacing slowing down big time in various moments as a means to stage her clunky symbolism.
“The Watchers” isn’t even really a horror movie per se, as it is something of a clumsy allegory for grief and guilt. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but the writers harp on these themes so much that when everything comes full circle, it’s all so inadvertently comical than it is sad.
This forest isn’t charted on any map. Every car breaks down at its treeline. Mina’s is no different. Left stranded, she is forced into the dark woodland only to find a woman shouting, urging Mina to run to a concrete bunker. As the door slams behind her, the building is besieged by screams. Mina finds herself in a room with a wall of glass, and an electric light that activates at nightfall, when the Watchers come above ground. These creatures emerge to observe their captive humans and terrible things happen to anyone who doesn’t reach the bunker in time.
“The Watchers” presents us with glimmers of what could be a great story about voyeurism (a la “My Little Eye”), or perhaps exploitation. Or maybe it could be about wasting our lives away on nonsense pursuits. No, it literally does nothing with these ideas offering them up instead as superficial jump scares that fails every single time. To make matters worse the movie barely hits ninety minutes and we’re with these characters in the mysterious triangle house with the big windows for about thirty minutes tops.
The rest of the movie is them attempting to escape or learn about what’s holding them hostage in these woods. There are no moments demonstrating isolation or boredom or even cabin fever as we saw in films like “Dawn of the Dead” or “The Thing.” We never settle down to visit these characters or know them nor do we ever get to understand their personalities and small idiosyncrasies. Everyone on the cast looks bored, especially Dakota Fanning whose performance is anemic at best, most of the time.
Shyamalan wastes folks like Georgina Campbell, effectively reducing them to sparse emotional anchors for Fanning who can do this kind of character in her sleep. Everyone is wasted especially its two stars who, with the right material, could have delivered amazing performances filled with emotional stress, and panic. Here, they can barely muster up a snore.
Being a Shyamalan apologist, I hope Ishina is able to tell her own scary tales, but “The Watchers” just isn’t their best debut. “The Watchers” is a colossal waste of time; it’s one tedious, boring experience teeming with potential that just wastes it at every turn