REVIEW: ‘The Watchers’ Is Good Folk Horror And Better Theater Horror

Stepping out of your famous father’s shadow can be a weighty endeavor, but it’s one that writer-director Ishana Night Shyamalan takes head-on with her debut feature film The Watchers (2024). Based on the novel by A.M. Shine, the film is produced by M. Night Shyamalan, Ashwin Rajan, and Nimitt Mankad, with Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Oliver Finnegan, and Olwen Fouere starring in this dark fairy tale.

In The Watchers (2024), Mina is a 28-year-old American artist. Still filled with grief from her mother’s death, she’s living in Ireland and working in a pet shop. Putting on a new persona at night, it’s clear that she is trying to be anyone but herself. But when her boss asks her to deliver a pet bird, she finds herself stranded in an expansive, untouched forest in western Ireland.

With birds flying overhead and a rumbling ground, Mina follows an old woman into a shelter only to become trapped alongside three strangers. There is Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), the wise professor, the woman who has been there the longest, and the enforcer of the rules. Following is Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), a shy young man, a hunter, and the weakest regarding mental fortitude. Finally, Ciara (Georgina Campbell), a woman still hoping to be reunited with her husband again.

The quartet is watched and stalked by mysterious creatures in a concrete structure with one-way glass as one wall each night. They stand with their face to the glass and are forbidden to turn their back to the audience; it’s all unsettling. You can’t see them, but they see everything: clapping, taunting, and enforcing a strict series of rules that Mina tests.

At its core, The Watchers (2024) succeeds because of its creeping atmosphere bolstered by an eerie score and Shyamalan’s dedication to creating an entire world, not just a moment in it. For the former, the forest’s depth is pushed by the wide landscape shots of the spikey trees that simultaneously feel majestic and uninhabitable. The film’s coldness creeps through each scene and chills the audience as each character grows more distant and disconnected from the reality they know and connected to the danger they’re living through. The scale of the shelter makes the titular Watchers’ subjects feel extremely small in the face of everything.

A key element to the film’s suspense and tension is the passage of time and the consequences that come with the restlessness that it stirs in Mina. Time passes indiscriminately, but the sets wear over time as Mina illustrates the forest she explores. The tape of reality TV gets more and more irritating. And the dynamics between the group fray as the days drag on.

As Mina, Dakota Fanning offers a depth of melancholy and loneliness that overtakes her character. Defiant, yes, but her individualistic attitude is stripped away piece by piece as we uncover her gutting past. Her performance is perfect in just about every way. A long way from what we’ve seen her in before, Fanning embodies listlessness and defiance in equal measure, growing as the layers of personality unfurl.

The Watchers (2024) also delivers a good creature feature in its last act. As the quartet’s audience is revealed, saliva flows, and an uncanny valley of proportions emerges. Shyamalan’s eye for creature design is reverent to the source material and unique to the vision she’s created throughout the film. The monsters at hand are scary, but more importantly, they’re familiar.

That familiarity is twisted throughout the film as an anchor for the audience, who can smell the twist from far away. However, despite the predictability, the execution helps the film keep steam. Shyamalan’s world is thoughtful and dark, but more importantly, it is terror-filled and whimsical in equal parts.

The Watchers (2024), however, doesn’t go as far as it could. Instead, the film continues almost 15 minutes too long, adding in exposition that wasn’t ultimately needed. While the acts featured in the last sequences of the film, it all feels like an epilogue. Because of that, it doesn’t smoothly bring the audience to the present thinking about the world they just watched develop. Instead, we learn everything, and I do mean everything. That expository dump is too much but doesn’t remove too much from the main narrative.

Ultimately, the most important thing about The Watchers (2024) is that in her debut film, Ishana Night Shyamalan has shown that her voice is distinctive from her father’s. While some hallmarks of his legacy remain (twists and all), her cinematic language is striking visuals and defined character relationships with landscapes that become characters in themselves are unique. She knows who she is as a filmmaker, and despite its small third-act faults, The Watchers (2024) makes for good folk horror but even better theater horror.

The Watchers (2024) is in theaters nationwide on June 7, 2024.