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.

Barbarian

Airbnb

Barbarian
Directed by Zach Cregger
USA 2022
20th Century Fox

Barbarian is a film which I missed when it played at this year’s August Bank Holiday edition of FrightFest. Which is a shame, since it turned out to be one of the best loved films of that four day period. However, it’s now playing in UK cinemas and so I finally get to see this one. It’s considered a horror film by many but, due to the nature of the antagonist of the film, I’m a little unsure whether I would bravely categorise this one in that genre and I don’t want to get into that argument again (for me, it’s probably more a thriller) but, it certainly uses horror genre conventions to tell its tale and, although it does mine a lot of the tropes and clichés of that genre... well, this film is still pants wettingly scary for a good deal of its running time. If you can juggle the cliches and do it right, as the director and actors do here, then you can really come up with something which transcends the usual batch of signifiers and that’s exactly what’s happened here... it’s a film which had me on the edge of my seat, so to speak, for a lot of the time, as the suspense was almost unbearable.

Okay. so one of those things the film does so well is set the tone in a way that hails back, in my mind, to a conversation Brian De Palma once had with composer Bernard Herrmann, when they were working on the brilliant Sisters (reviewed here). Herrmann really went for it on the opening titles cue and De Palma was hankering to being more subtle with the music at this point and holding back, from what I understand. Herrmann was characteristically candid in his reply that someone like Hitchcock could get away with being more subtle on the scoring at the start because, with Hitch’s reputation, they knew something awful or scary was going to eventually happen. When you’re a relatively new director, that’s not going to be the case and, yeah, this attitude works like a charm in Barbarian.

For most of the first 40 minutes, protagonists Tess and Keith, both brilliant performances by Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgärd, find they’ve double booked the same Airbnb through different companies but, after some reservations on Tess part, they decide to both stay at the property for a couple of nights. The first five to ten minutes play out, not really with any tension in them except... yeah... the opening music on the title card and other occasional, subtle and sometimes less subtle, scary music shenanigans going on in the background. So even though you’re watching something fairly benign for a short while... the music comes in at various intervals to remind you that you are not going to be in for a comfortable ride.

The dialogue between these two characters is interesting because Keith is trying his best not to seem like a freakish serial killer or stalker to the point when, you know, you just assume he is. Even though he’s a really nice guy but, yeah, it’s always the nice guy, right? Tess, after some ‘toing and froing’, decides to ignore all the warning signs and... that works out fine. Onto evening two... where things get spooky but, what the writer/director does with this long lead in is... he sets the audience up to expect danger from one avenue and then, of course, plays with those expectations a little later in the film.

Something then happens which I’m not going to spoil here before... we cut to a different story altogether... an actor played by Justin Long, who has been the victim of a recent Me Too accusation and had his life turned upside down. That being said, just because he’s a victim of this kind of nasty accusation, doesn’t mean he’s also the better person either... he ultimately turns out to be a disappointing specimen of a human being when push comes to shove later on in the story, for sure. Then, this second story slice dovetails neatly into the first story slice before then drifting into a third. And, I have to say, the third story excerpt made no sense to me at first because, since the 1980s seems just like last week to someone of my age, I didn’t realise until right after the end credits started rolling that this third detour was a flashback. It needed a bit more signposting for me, to be honest. And then, of course, once I thought about it, it does indeed lead back into the first two slivers of story beats we’ve already seen.

Not saying anymore about the plot because, although it’s sheer genius in the way it’s done, it’s a bit of a one trick pony in terms of the story’s trajectory (but what a trick!) and I’m guessing it might not have the best rewatch value in terms of future revisits because of this aspect.

The film looks absolutely fantastic though, with moody lighting styles pitched against the more clinical aspects of the ‘ground floor’ of the Airbnb and a really nice use of vertical upright slices to chop the screen up and delineate the actors in their space. Even a scene outside of the residence, when Tess goes for an interview with a documentary film-maker, is shot inside a particular kind of office building filled with strong vertical slats everywhere. And, yeah, that’s all a visual cliché in itself perhaps but, I’m not getting tired of this kind of compositional approach from directors anytime soon.

The music is good too. The film is sparsely spotted but the scored scenes really work and, again a cliché but the inclusion of a ramping up heartbeat motif on the score or audio design really works well in a couple of sequences. This coupled with the wonderful cinematography and some really great acting by a cast who manage to bring the characters to life and make them people you can identify with... or be concerned about (to a point, not sure about the Me Too guy’s trajectory)... make for a very strong movie and all I can say about this is, horror or not, I can see why this film was so well received by audiences at Fright Fest this year. I think this one will have a good shelf life if it gets a proper physical media release. Plus, without going into too many spoilers, I’m never going to tire of seeing characters in a film pull off a random limb from another character and use it as a club-like weapon.

Now, I have a couple of criticisms in that I felt the ending was a bit of a low key resolution to things. I would have liked a little more from it, perhaps the hint of an outside collusion from figures of authority or some such. And I would have liked the local neighbourhood outside the Airbnb place to maybe have more of an explanation as to why the area is practically deserted and why the houses have been left abandoned and in ruins over the years. The obvious tie ins to the main plot on that score don’t really make a whole lot of sense, truth be told. But, asides from that, yeah, Barbarian is a brilliant movie and a solid recommendation from me. A very suspenseful, intense movie, for sure.