Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Watchers’ on Max, Ishana Night Shyamalan’s Twisty, Underwhelming Directorial Debut

The behind-the-camera story of The Watchers (now streaming on Max) might be more compelling than the one in front of it. The film is the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of M. Night Shyamalan, director of horror classic The Sixth Sense and many other films defined by their twist endings (be they effective or just preposterous). Ishana won’t avoid any nepo-baby accusations, considering her first professional gigs were as second-unit directors of her father’s films Old and Knock at the Cabin, and primary director for several episodes of his TV series Servant. The Watchers finds Ishana adapting A.M. Shine’s novel of the same name – and perhaps showing a little too much of her father’s influence in her own work. 

THE WATCHERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: You’ll recall a trend from 10, maybe 12 years ago when countless horror films featured creepy totems – dolls, symbolic doodads and the like – made out of bound-together tree branches. I call this the Evil Twig Phenomenon. Well, The Watchers is set in a forest consisting wholly of Evil Twigs. Not a good and wholesome twig in the whole thousand-acre wood. It’s in Western Ireland, and abandon all hope ye who etc. etc. We watch as a doomed man gets lost in the forest and attacked by yowling gurgling moaning things who stay conspicuously out-of-frame. Can’t reveal the inevitably disappointing-looking creatures too early, lest ye want to see the suspense evaporate like dew off a sunning turtle’s shell, you know!

Next we meet Mina (Dakota Fanning), an American in Galway, bored out of her mind behind the counter at a mall pet shop. She vapes and stares, vapes and stares. Sometimes she sketches in her sketchbook. It seems she’s been sad for a long time. She’s given a yellow bird to transport from here all the way across the island, and she talks to it. Tells it how today is the 15th anniversary of her mother’s death. She gets calls from her twin sister and never returns them. “You wouldn’t like me if you knew the real me,” she tells Tweety. 

She loads the bird in her car and sets forth on her delivery. IS SHE AT THE DEATH FOREST OF DOOM YET?, you’re surely asking, and to that I say, just wait like 45 seconds. She’s tooling along and her GPS fritzes out and then the car dies and she gets out decides to walk the rest of the way even though she’s in a death forest of doom, and not just any death forest of doom, but THE death forest of doom. She doesn’t have much choice. She sets forth and gets lost because this place seems like a place where time and space have no meaning. Dusk looms, and we all know what happens when dusk happens in movies set in Evil Twigs: The Forest, namely, bad things. Just when something runs with an exaggerated WHOOSH in front of the camera and we just know Mina is toast, she meets Madeline (Olwen Fouere), who speaks with the ominous tones of a narrator tasked with explaining all the boring intricacies of the plot, e.g., “This must be where the fairies were imprisoned. It is said they once lived among us as gods. The bridge between nature and man. But over time…” It goes on like this. 

In short: The Watchers come out at night and if you’re out at night too, they’ll kill yer ass. So Madeline and two others, Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) hole up in a square bunker-building they call The Coop; one wall of it is a two-way mirror that allows the Watcher creatures to watch them every night, and if the Watchers don’t get to watch them, they get real mad and slashy. So everyone hangs out in The Coop for a while, being boring characters, until Mina decides to break some of the Watchers’ “rules” and therefore rile them. They can’t stay here forever, can they? There has to be a way out of this woods. Maybe a path leading them to the village from The Village? If only!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Watchers is probably what we’d have got if M. Night had directed the McConaughey movie about the Japanese suicide forest. (That’s The Sea of Trees, if you must know, although you almost certainly don’t. It too is a lousy movie.) And hey, at least Brandon Cronenberg makes good movies — Possessor, Infinity Pool — that follow in his parent’s footsteps.

Performance Worth Watching: This goes to Campbell by default, because her character isn’t a plot cog like all the others are, therefore allowing her to render Ciara more of a recognizable human being instead of a movie construct.

Memorable Dialogue: Did I mention that the Tweety bird can mimic humans? And that Mina tells it, “Try not to die,” and it therefore repeats “Try not to die! Try not to die!” like a mantra throughout the movie?

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Q: How does Madeline know all this stuff? She’s a mythology prof, that’s how! She speaks like she wrote her thesis about the Watchers and then wrote a book about the Watchers that became a very dull and annoying movie about the Watchers. Just endless expertise on arcane forest creatures, spewing from her like bile from Regan McNeil’s gullet. Good thing Madeline is out there among the Evil Twigs and not just, you know, a cable-TV phone-sales rep or something. And it is said that any movie in which a character uses the phrase “it is said” in normal conversation is a movie that needs a rewrite. Badly. 

It also is said that plots employing hallucinations, shapeshifting creatures and bad dreams – all present here – are lazy and manipulative, using the kind of hacky shit that allows screenwriters to make up the “rules” of the plot on the fly, and pull rugs out from under us when a character who seems to be the right character is actually the wrong character, or to make us constantly question what’s “real” and what’s merely a figment, stuff like that. 

This is also a Shoe’s Gotta Drop At Some Point plot, which will do nothing to douse the comparisons between Ishana and her father; with it’s tease-the-mystery methodology, stilted dialogue, a penchant for jump scares and a big third act twist, The Watchers could easily be passed as an M. Night joint comparable to one of his less egregious stinkers (think Old more than the abomination that is The Happening). And with that comes at least a few instances of impressive technical filmmaking, wasted in the employ of a ridiculous, underwhelming story populated with flimsy characters led by a sullen, one-note protagonist. One senses Ishana’s attempt to stir horror, whimsy and magical realism into a foamy broth, but the result is underwhelming. It feels like M. Night lite, and considering the rickety creative ground he’s been standing on for two decades, that’s not a flattering comparison.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Who’s watching The Watchers? People who probably should be doing something else.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.