'The Watchers' Review: Ishana Night Shyamalan's Revelatory Directorial Debut
While ‘The Watchers’ falls apart near its end, its assured direction from Ishana Night Shyamalan showcases a singular talent in the making and a new voice to look out for in genre cinema.
Within the first second of The Watchers, writer/director Ishana Night Shyamalan immediately jolts our attention by reviving the classic New Line Cinema logo, with the Michael Kamen jingle to support it, establishing its nature in a far more exciting way before its opening sequence introduces us to its central mystery. This logo has been revived twice in the span of just a few months, with Michael Chaves’ The Nun II also setting its atmosphere with it (albeit without the jingle).
There certainly isn’t anything more exciting than an old logo being resurrected for your film because it gives it so much personality. The only worry is with such a high, the rest of it may not live up to the hype you’re setting as soon as your eyes observe a recurring object from your past. But Shyamalan assuredly directs her picture with enough verve to hold our attention throughout, even if its ideas don’t cohere as much as they should.
Most critics who look at The Watchers will see it in the shadow of Ishana’s father, M. Night Shyamalan, who arguably created his own style of filmmaking over the years. And as much as his imprint seems felt in the way the storytelling is told (particularly through its final act, which pulls back the curtain on what we previously saw with one ‘bold’ twist after the next that falls completely flat on their face, a classic Shyamalan trope), there isn’t a single image from that movie that isn’t decidedly Ishana’s.
With cinematographer Eli Arenson, Ishana crafts her own enveloping and patient cinematic language (with a stark use of a hued yellow worthy of Rainer Werner Fassbinder) as we follow Mina (Dakota Fanning), a young adult who gets inexplicably stranded in a forest in the Irish countryside. Unbeknownst to her, the forest contains mysterious creatures known as ‘The Watchers,’ who appear at night and kill everyone in sight. It’s there that she meets Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), a mysterious woman whom she finds shelter inside a bunker-like home with two other people, Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), The Watchers observe them as they go about their day.
Of course, their goal is to get out of here, and the story is fairly straightforward. But this is Shyamalan we’re talking about, and there’s bound to be a twist somewhere, and it’s unfortunately where the movie begins to sink. The concept of the twist is interesting enough, but the execution leaves little to be desired, particularly in how its carefully meticulous aesthetic suddenly shifts into ineffective, made-for-TV-movie-lite shots of PG-13 horror and ridiculous lines thrown at the screen (such as when one character yells “RUN!” to a person who is being decimated into pieces…good luck with that).
This, unfortunately, sinks what the first two halves of the movie (slowly) built towards, with a creeping atmosphere worthy of Shyamalan’s The Village. Close-up shots of Mina’s tears, as she reminisces upon her dark past (sharply cut together by editor Job ter Burg), give palpable amounts of emotional complexity to the protagonist, while Fanning portrays a broken protagonist who longs for reparation but is too held on to the past to leap towards it.
It’s her best performance since starring in Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, with an equally riveting (albeit underdeveloped) cast supporting Mina in her journey. Campbell and Fouéré are particularly effective in its first two halves, but their arcs begin to sink as we start learning more about them in its uneventful climax, which stretches the runtime to a point where its meat-and-potatoes story starts to overcomplexify itself to subvert expectations à la M. Night. Only one director can do it well, and, unfortunately, Ishana doesn’t have the skills to pull it off like her father (and it’s about the only time in which we can rightfully compare her to him and call this film a product of nepotism would be unfair and insulting). There may be this insistence in that regard for her to follow in her footsteps, and whenever she tries to be M. Night 2.0, the movie begins to weaken substantially. Its writing becomes wobbly and unconfident, and so does its visual style.
Though what comes before is so vivid in its imagination, atmosphere, and stark visual language that it immediately cements Ishana Night Shyamalan as a new voice to watch in genre cinema who refined her skills through the world of television before developing her own language that her father cannot – and will not – replicate. As the credits rolled, the one thing that came into my mind was how I couldn’t wait to see what she would do next, whether an atmospheric horror like The Watchers or something completely different. Let’s hope it’ll be the latter as she begins to forge her own path as a singular auteur.