It would not be an overstatement to call many of veteran director M Night Shyamalan’s films as seminal works that redefined the thriller genre. His films — which focus on characters with personal struggles as they face extraordinary circumstances — with his unique style of filmmaking that uses sound and vision as storytelling tools, have turned out to be cult classics over the years. The Watchers, his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut directorial, borrows some elements from the auteur’s works. But the film’s answer to whether the apple has fallen far from the tree is more complicated than a mere yes or no.
In The Watchers, Ishana Night Shyamalan’s antagonists are mysterious creatures who watch trapped people in a room through a mirrored window. When a lost Mina (Dakota Fanning) finds herself in the company of Ciara (Georgina Campbell), Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), it’s up to the ragtag group of survivors to escape from the forest.
The Watchers (English)
Director: Ishana Night Shyamalan
Cast: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan
Runtime: 102 minutes
Storyline: A woman gets stranded in the woods and finds refuge with three strangers only to know that they are being stalked by mysterious creatures
Shyamalan plays with tropes that are neither new to fans of the genre nor those familiar with her father’s extended filmography; we have the set of “rules” to be followed, the creatures cannot come out in daylight, and the survivors make the silliest of mistakes in the name of trying to… survive. The film starts with a nameless man being dragged into a forest by a creature, and when Mina steps into the location, the film skims through them rapidly and puts us straight into the middle of the action. After the formal induction by the comparatively more experienced Madeline, who was once a teacher, Mina and the audience understand the dos and don’ts. But fortune favours the brave, and the rules, like in all films that deal with a similar concept, are meant to be broken. What follows are a series of discoveries as the characters and we get closer to who these creatures are and why they get hooked to being peeping Toms with the trapped folks like it’s the latest episode of Bigg Boss.
The film does its best when it sticks to the fear of the unknown and what’s lurking past the mirrored window. With a strong command over the technical aspects, Shyamalan (once again, like her father) uses blurred backgrounds and layered imagery to create a sense of unease. She lets us indulge in the fantasy of how these creatures might look before they appear in all their glory. But once that wrapper is off, the film has very little to offer. For starters, for a film with just four primary characters, The Watchers’ supporting cast lacks depth, and as they fight through life-and-death situations, it rarely makes us fret about them, let alone root for them.
A still from ‘The Watchers’
| Photo Credit:
@WarnerBrosPictures/YouTube
Similar to M Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water, where the protagonist loses his wife and children and then encounters a mythological creature, or Signs, in which the lead, who is mourning the death of his wife, encounters an alien invasion, Mina from The Watchers is struggling to cope up with the death of her mother which she inadvertently causes as a child. But the expositions only help in adding more weightage to the character and not the film itself. It also aids in extending the runtime, given the concept is too small to bank on entirely. But that said, only when you thought the film had ended do you learn that there’s still a good chunk of runtime left to deliver the final twist that lands with the impact of a dry leaf on a forest floor.
Despite an interesting premise, The Watchers succumbs to the templates of the genre, and the fact that it would remind viewers of films that reinvented thrillers — like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or even M Night Shyamalan’s very own The Village, does not help much. With uninteresting characters and thrills expected from suspense rather than scares, The Watchers does not do justice to the genre or its famous source material. You know a thriller is in trouble if the only character you want to escape unscathed is an animal, and if it’s a parrot that keeps saying, “Try not to die”, you know it’s been trying to watch out for you!
The Watchers is currently running in theatres