Critics Have Seen The Watchers, And Many Of Them Are Comparing It To Dad M. Night Shyamalan's Work

Nearly every single element, from Mina's backstory to Ciara's mental state to Madeline's guidance, just stops making sense if the right question is asked. Not the worst cinema sin, but when that question so often starts with, ‘How on Earth...?’ it's not so easily forgivable. Thankfully, Ishana Shyamalan imbues The Watchers with high levels of creepiness throughout, and has more than enough skills behind the camera to keep audiences invested in the woodsy weirdness. I truly cannot wait to see where her career goes next, and I'll be adding some cushioning to the edge of my seat in the meantime.

The first feature written and directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan, doesn't stray far from the twisty webs of intrigue and suspense weaved by her famous father. There’s plenty to admire in this mystery-box thriller about a group of strangers imprisoned by the eponymous, unseen woodland observers. If nothing else, Shyamalan has absorbed plenty of lessons about suspense and atmosphere from her time on the sets of like-minded movies like Knock at the Cabin. But the more The Watchers comes together, the less interesting it becomes. It’s a puzzle best left unsolved.

Ishana Night Shyamalan’s direction is mostly fine. Her screenplay is mostly a series of gambits piled on top of one another, adding up to a horror-movie crockpot, one that grows less creepy and effective as it goes along. We don’t have any great investment in the characters, and … the film [begins] to grow top-heavy with its mythology. Of course, it’s also a problem that if you’re going to play the busy and derivative mainstream-horror game, you’ve got to deliver, as in jump scares or moments that make us shiver in, you know, horror. The Watchers is too restrained for all that; it wants to be a kind of fairy tale. In this case, though, there’s too much impeccable pretension and not enough things that go bump in the Shyamalan night.

Even as making eerie works about people thrown into terrifying situations is the family business, with the two previously doing great work together on the underrated series Servant and the flawed yet frightening Old, The Watchers sees the apple falling far from the tree and rolling into a dark pit that it never gets out of. Even as it benefits from having a largely solid cast, with both Dakota Fanning and Olwen Fouéré doing their darndest to plow through the most perfunctory dialogue you’ll hear this year, it is a losing battle that only gets worse the longer it all drags on. This is the nepo baby movie to end all nepo baby movies.

Shyamalan, like her lead protagonist, keeps the story and its characters shrouded in mystery for as long as possible, instead focusing on the ambient atmosphere and building up the threat with various intense near-misses and rule-defying encounters. The strong visual language and production design help lure you in, along with Shyamalan’s attempts to establish the unseen Watchers as something fearsome, and it’s easy to overlook just how underdeveloped the story and its characters are. But the more time passes, the less the humans’ choices make sense. Shyamalan seems to realize this, because when the movie finally seems to pick up its intensity for a third act confrontation, the filmmaker screeches the momentum to a halt to deliver nonstop exposition too superficial and clumsy to work.