It would not be an overstatement to call many of veteran director M Night Shyamalan’s films seminal works that redefined the thriller genre. His films, focusing on characters with personal struggles as they face extraordinary circumstances, combined with his unique style of filmmaking using sound and vision as storytelling tools, have turned out to be cult classics over the years. “The Watchers,” his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut directorial effort, borrows some elements from the auteur’s works. But the film’s answer to whether the apple has fallen far from the tree is more complicated than a mere yes or no.
In “The Watchers,” Ishana Night Shyamalan’s antagonists are mysterious creatures who observe trapped people in a room through a mirrored window. When a lost Mina (Dakota Fanning) finds herself in the company of Ciara (Georgina Campbell), Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), it’s up to this ragtag group of survivors to escape from the forest.
Shyamalan plays with tropes that are neither new to fans of the genre nor to those familiar with her father’s comprehensive filmography. We have the set of “rules” to be followed, creatures that cannot come out in daylight, and survivors making the silliest of mistakes in the name of trying to… survive. The film starts with a nameless man being dragged into a forest by a creature. When Mina steps into the location, the film rapidly progresses and places us straight into the middle of the action. After a formal induction by the comparatively more experienced Madeline, once a teacher, Mina and the audience understand the dos and don’ts. But as is the case with all films that deal with a similar concept, fortune favours the brave and the rules are meant to be broken. What follows are a series of discoveries as the characters and we get closer to understanding who these creatures are and why they get hooked to peering at the trapped folks like it’s the latest episode of Bigg Boss.
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The film does its best when it sticks to the fear of the unknown and what’s lurking past the mirrored window. With a strong command over technical aspects, Shyamalan (like her father) uses blurred backgrounds and layered imagery to create a sense of unease. She lets us indulge in the fantasy of how these creatures might look before they appear in all their menacing glory. However, once that wrapper is off, the film has very little to offer. For starters, for a film with just four primary characters, “The Watchers” features a supporting cast that lacks depth. As they fight through life-and-death situations, it rarely makes us stress about them, let alone root for them.
A still from ‘The Watchers’ | Photo Credit: @WarnerBrosPictures/YouTube
Similar to M Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water where the protagonist loses his wife and children before encountering a mythological creature or Signs where the lead, mourning the death of his wife, encounters an alien invasion, Mina from “The Watchers” is struggling to cope with the death of her mother, which she inadvertently caused as a child. However, these expositions only help in adding more weight to the character rather than to the film itself. The extended runtime seems like an attempt to fill gaps, given the concept is too small to sustain without such additions. Just when you think the film has come to an end, you learn there’s still a good chunk of runtime left to deliver the final twist, which unfortunately lands with the impact of a dry leaf on a forest floor.
Despite an interesting premise, “The Watchers” succumbs to the templates of the genre. The fact that it reminds viewers of films that reinvented thrillers — like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or even M Night Shyamalan’s very own The Village — does not help much either. With uninteresting characters and thrills that rely more on suspense than scares, “The Watchers” doesn’t do justice to the genre or its renowned source material. You know a thriller is in trouble if the only character you want to escape unscathed is an animal. And if it’s a parrot that keeps saying, “Try not to die,” then you know it’s been trying to warn you.
“The Watchers” is currently running in theatres.
