The Watchers (2024 film)

Category: Supernatural drama/thriller

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The majority of reviews I read for this 2024 supernatural drama movie rated it negatively. However, I enjoyed this movie enough (for the most part) to come to a different opinion, putting me in the minority of reviewers who thought this movie was overall positive. But there two lessons - know when to end a movie, and when will people learn to not blindly trust their GPS?

The plot explained:

Dakota Fanning plays Mina, an aspiring artist who works a dead-end job in Galway, Ireland, and is asked by her boss to drive a precious Golden Conure parrot to a zoo in Belfast.

However, just like with Outback, the GPS is the movie's first villain as it leads Mina deep into a forest with no paved road in the west of Ireland when her car suddenly breaks down and the electronics stop working. As she walks around the forest looking for assistance (caged Golden Conure in hand), she first notices her car isn't where she thought it was and can't be found, and then she suddenly sees an elderly woman walking alone. She gives chase to the elderly woman who leads her to an incongruous box-like structure whose defining feature is a large one-way mirror in the front that allows the outside to see in, but the people inside to only see their reflection.

The elderly lady (Olwen Fouere) introduces herself as Madeleine, and the other two in the room as Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) who are both about Mina's age. It turns out that every night, the occupants of the room are required to present themselves to the window to be observed by The Watchers until daybreak at which time the occupants need to observe the rules: no-one is to be out at night, and no-one is to go near the burrows (large openings in the ground that lead to deep holes).

Mina gets to understand the dynamic of the group - Madeleine is the elderly stateswoman of the group who knows how things operate, Daniel who is hot-headed, but good at hunting and electronics; and Ciara who knows botany and can dance. The only form of entertainment in The Coop are a record player and an old CRT TV with a DVD of a Big Brother-style reality show. Naturally, Mina resents having her movement and her curiosity curtailed and gets Daniel to assist her in going down a burrow. She gets down the burrow to see a well-established underground tunnel system and along a wall, she sees various items - a bike, a torch, a newspaper from 1992, and a camcorder.

Daniel ropes up the bike and camcorder, but in the dying light, a figure slowly approaches Mina, scaring her right before Daniel rescues her in the knick of time.

Back at The Coop, Daniel hooks up the camcorder to the TV and the group settle in, but notice that The Watchers are yet to make their regular nightly visit. All of a sudden, there is a knock at the door and it's Ciara's husband, John, who went missing in the opening sequence of the film. However, Madeleine refuses to let Ciara open the door as she knows that The Watchers can take the form of other people, so she gets Ciara to ask the person outside the door a proof-of-life question and to reveal himself on the camcorder. Just as we see his face on the screen, he is dragged away and another being approaches the camera and rips it away, leading to prolonged banging on The Coop. Madeleine understands this as The Watchers being angry at Mina having broken the rules, so the next day she drops the bicycle back down the burrow as a mea culpa.

Tempers fray as winter sets in, leading Daniel to tie Madeleine up outside while he and Ciara get to The Coop right as night falls. This leaves Madeleine and Mina outside to hide under a bush as they hope to avoid being sniffed out by The Watchers, who we now see are elongated bipedal humanoid creatures also capable of quadrapedal motion. Upset at seeing two people are missing, The Watchers retreat which gives Madeleine and Mina an opportunity to get back in The Coop, but not before Mina pleads her case by revealing she inadvertently caused her mother's death. Inside, Madeleine reveals The Watchers are the faeries of old who are trying to study humans in order to better mimic them, but they haven't got things quite right so their attempts at mimicry are almost always deformed.

With all four members inside The Coop, The Watchers launch an assault on the building, leading Daniel to discover a false floor under a rug that leads to a hatch and a ladder. With everyone now safe deep underground, they discover a study chamber complete with a bed and computer. On the computer are video logs produced by Prof. Rory Kilmartin who built The Coop and the bunker in his attempt to study the faeries. Subsequent video diary entries reveal he has captured one and bonded with it, he has a boat ready for escape, he wants his research at his university office destroyed, but also realises he can't continue his work at which point he shoots the faery, then himself.

This leads to an audacious escape attempt by the four to reach the boat mentioned in the video logs, but right as they're about to escape, Daniel is tricked by a shapeshifted John who kills Daniel infront of the three women. The women, however, are safe as the faeries can't leave the forest nor can they withstand sunlight.

They wake up the next day in the boat and find themselves in a town with a bus that takes them back to Galway. Mina gains access to the Professor's university office by stating she is Kilmartin's niece looking to understand her uncle's work. She snoops around and finds research that showed that at one time, humans and faeries lived in harmony and even procreated to form hybrids, but then a war broke out leading to humans banishing the faeries to the forest without their wings and sealed under a stone seal.

Mina heads to Ciara's house to show her some photos she salvaged from the professor's stash, revealing that the professor's wife was Madeleine - who died back in 2001, meaning the Madeleine we saw was not the real Madeleine. Things take a turn for the worse as the REAL Ciara pulls up in the driveway and is assaulted by the faery who has becomes a poor mimic of Daniel. Madeleine reveals her faery self and is about to kill Mina, but Mina gets Madeleine to reveal she was banished because she was able to walk in sunlight, leading to the realisation that Madeleine is a hybrid (which makes me wonder if Prof Kilmartin fucked a faery to create a clone of his wife).

In the closing scene, we see Mina reconcile with her twin sister, Lucy, and that Madeleine is watching over her, usually taking the form of a small red-headed girl with telling deformities.

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The cinematography was great. Special effects were suitably creepy, as well as the sound design. As a production, I think everyone did a bang-up job!

I also got some very strong Lost vibes (not a bad thing), given this story is about a group of strangers being stranded in a place with otherworldly properties.

And having had watched season 2 of The Tourist, I was familiar with the acting abilities of Olwen Fouere. If you need someone to play a seasoned and slightly scary Irish woman, Fouere is your person!

But in the end, this was a Shyamalan film - not M. Night Shyamalan this time, but his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan - and it shows. Now, I didn't know this was a Shyamalan film before I hit play, but by the time I got to the end, I just had a sneaking feeling that someone is a) pulling punches, and b) overcomplicating things, and then when the credits rolled, it hit me - Shyamalan!

The Watchers, in the end, came across as a drama with supernatural elements rather than a thrillfest, despite there being so much room for bloodshed and existential dread. Maybe that's what the Shyamalans want to be remembered for - being the Hallmark of the horror genre where sure, there is a sense of fear, but there's always something wholesome about the ending that sanitises what you just watched.

The other telling feature of Shyamalan films is the sudden entry of light-hearted moments amongst the serious drama - In Knock At The Cabin, it was a cheesy infomercial and in this movie, it's the clips of the reality show.

However, there's also a lesson to be learned with when and how to end a film. In my estimation, the scene where the women leave the forest on the boat was the best moment to end the film. Now, ending a movie 82 minutes in is sacrilege nowdays, so Shyamalan could have taken some more inspiration from Lost and added some ambigious flash-forwards to set a scene of dread and then make the last shot of the film Madeleine realising her plan to escape the forest is successful. But instead, we see this dramatic chase, Daniel dies, then the action slows right down as we get some complicated exposition before the dramatic climax.

All being said, this is not a lousy film. It just loses so much pace in the last stanza that it knocks the film down from being Great to just OK because to me, the boat scene was THE shot to end the film on.

STAR RATING: 3.5/5.