Dakota Fanning stars as Mina, an American ex-pat living in Ireland, who becomes stranded and lost in a mysterious forest. As night begins to fall, an older woman, Madeline (Mandy‘s Olwen Fouéré) urges her to take shelter in a concrete bunker she calls the Coop. Inside are another two people – Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) – and the three of them fill Mina in on her situation. There are some sort of craetures that inhabit the forest. Since they only come out at night, the four are free to roam outside during the day, hunting and gathering food. However, they need to be back and locked inside the Coop before sundown when the Watchers come out or else they would be killed by the mysterious forest dwellers. The Coop has one wall that is a one way mirror that allows the Watchers to stare at them for some unknown purpose, as if they’re in a zoo. With the woods extending farther than one can travel before sundown, Mina finds herself struggling to find a way to freedom.
The Watchers is the debut feature from Ishana Shyamalan, daughter of thrill master M Night Shymalan, who serves as a producer here. This is not a bad film, up to a point. She shows a competent hand in creating tension, although some of her shot composition is reminiscent of her father’s work.
The story of the film is structured somewhat oddly. The film gets to a point that feels like a good endpoint, even if it does strangely echo the end of Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. In fact, I would think more highly of The Watchers if it had the guts to end it right there. It would have left some questions unresolved, but not everything needs to be tied up with a bow.
Unfortunately, Shyamalan seems to want to provide more lore about the creatures in the woods and give certain characters some kind of closing redemption moment. And that unfortunately leads to a few absolutely unbelievably ridiculous things that screenplay insists on in order to meets its intended thematic goals. I do not know how faithful the film is to the original novel by A. M. Shine, so I am hesitant to say where the fault lies for this. But the result just feels as if we are taking a fun, high concept horror-tinged thriller and overthinking it, gussying it up to something more than it needs to be.
