The Watchers

Ishana Shyamalan is unsuccessful at adopting a highly contemporary approach in the The Watchers, attempting to exploit the voyeurism of reality TV that has become popular in recent years.

In The Watchers, Dakota Fanning delivers a meagre performance as a woman who gets entangled in a web of thrilling intrigue when the stakes are high. As an American living alone in Ireland who works gloomily in a pet store during the day and socialises with strangers at night, her trip takes an unexpected turn when she gets lost in the middle of an electronic-destroying woodland where ominous unidentified beings inhabit the woods.

In this predictable slow-paced mystery, the setting’s general plausibility, the origins of the strange beings, and Mina’s background are foreshadowed in flashbacks that promise answers to questions that we seek convincing solutions to but fail to satisfy our curiosity.

Ishana’s narrative and her exasperating inconsistency of elegance is wearisome.

It feels like an enhanced and hostile video game. 

Fundamentally, the movie is comparable to The Village, which was written and directed by her father M. Night Shyamalan. Set in a nineteenth-century Pennsylvania commune, a group of people were manipulated and faced the wrath of invisible entities; yet, in stark contrast to The Watchers, it  was more substantial, startling and grounded. 

The Watcher’s odd backstory and clumsy attempts at symbolism overwhelms the senses, despite a few tense moments that fades into obscurity.

References to artificial intelligence, colonialism, social media, reality TV, and the traumatic consequences of horror only serve to heighten the sense of irony and become tiresome. 

Anxiety loses its power. Potential fear becomes trite.

The Watchers is now showing in cinemas.

-Dirk Lombard Fourie