The Watched

The Night Shift

The Watched
aka The Watchers
Directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan
Ireland/USA 2024
Blinding Edge Pictures
UK Theatrical Print

I  had high hopes when I was watching the trailer for The Watched, about a week before it was released into the wild, that this would be a pretty good horror picture. A few minutes before the film played, I found out that it has had a name change from its US title, The Watchers. Now I don’t know why this is so. It seems strange to me to change a title to directly shift it from highlighting the protagonists over the antagonists but, hey ho! It’s usually a sign of a picture not performing well on its initial release in another country. Then when I started watching it, my hopes for it plummeted for a bit when I saw the name M. Night Shyamalan on the production side... and, indeed, it’s the feature film directorial debut of his daughter Ishana.

However, I have to say that, while I felt there were some flaws with the movie, as it progressed, I was really quite taken by this one and will probably pick it up on Blu Ray for the Halloween period this year (assuming it gets a release in time). It starts off on the usual cold open where something dreadful happens, to give the viewer the idea of the stakes... and then we follow Dakota Fanning’s character Mina, picking up on her daily life and then to where her troubles start, as she loses power while driving through a huge forest area of Ireland, on the way to deliver a bird. Pretty soon, as darkness begins to fall, she realises that the forest is populated... not just with her ‘illusions’ of childhood trauma but with some pretty savage, aggressive creatures.

Just in time, she finds a building housing three other people who let her inside to be part of the audience for... The Watchers. They stand in front of a two way mirror which comprises one wall of the large room and the creatures, who they never see, come out to watch them every night. The other three are Olwen Fouére, Oliver Finnegan and Georgina Campbell (who was so good in Lovely, Dark and Deep at FrightFest last year... my review of that one is here).

And it’s actually a tight little movie with various levels which open up in the last half an hour or so. When the things in the woods are affronted by what Mina does at one point (there are rules), it becomes a game of survival to keep the things out each night (since it’s impossible to get out of the forest before nightfall, it’s too far), when they come out to watch and, possibly, hunt.

I like the way the film is shot with some nice dwelling on the idea of mirrors, reflections and doubling up on things in the visuals... elements which echo the nature of the creatures themselves. The creatures aren’t new and are standard parts of folklore (and have possibly been done to death over the last decade or so in cinema) but they’re well designed and when you finally see them, the suspense of the situation works quite well, ably enhanced by Abel Korzeniowski’s wonderful score (which sadly doesn’t seem to have been issued on CD, alas).

Now, there’s a bit of a downer and it’s probably stemming from the source novel by A.M. Shine (which this film has definitely made me want to read). And it's that the so called ‘big twist’ near the end is something which is telegraphed from fairly early on and which you wonder if the main protagonists are going to figure out before the reveal comes. And in many ways, this seems to be a theme for the Shyamalan family because Ishana’s dad also seems to fail to surprise with his plot twists (but like I said, this is probably because the novel also does this).

But I actually didn’t get annoyed about this because, once you are given the knowledge to work out what’s going on, it’s presented in a way that opens the film out for more ideas and, when some audience members might think the film is done, it actually goes on for three more ‘coda’ sequences which... well the first sequence brings the reveal (which you would have gotten by now anyway). The second sequence confirms it and expands on it and, yeah, I would have been annoyed but at the end of this there’s a nice pay off with the way the protagonist and antagonist, if that’s what they are, handle the situation. And there’s a further third scene which I could possibly have done without, which again echoes the theme of duality within the movie (and reminds us of the way Mina lives her life).

So, yeah, all in all I have a lot of time for The Watched and I think, judging from this one movie, that Ishana Night Shyamalan is at least as good a director as her dad... if not better (and I think she’ll prove to be better, if they let her do some more). A nice bit of folklore and a denouement which doesn’t, quite (asides from the obvious twist), end up where you think it might. Lovely little film and I hope to see more from this director in due course.