The Watchers: A New Shyamalan

Dripping with an eerie landscape, The Watchers, directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan (daughter of M. Night Shymalan) attempts to conjure up some of the best the horror/thriller genre has to offer. An eerie, yet beautiful setting of the Irish wilderness, we follow Mina, played by Dakota Fanning, as she gets lost in the middle of the woods trying to take a bird to Belfast. It’s here where she meets the other main characters of the film, Ciara, Madeline and Daniel. The three of them have been living in the woods in a building they call the Coop, where as long as they are inside with the doors shut by sundown they are safe from the mysterious Watchers that loom outside and only come out at night.

The first third of the film delivers what the trailers promise. A nail biting, thrilling mystery. Who are the watchers? What do they want? What is happening in the woods how does it bring people into it, and make them lose their way? But as the mystery unfolds, it unfolds almost too neatly. A deus ex machina event leads the group to not only safety, but the answers to most of their questions. It’s at this point about halfway through the film when it begins giving us answers that it unravels. In it’s conclusion it attempts to pull a classic Shyamalan twist that could’ve been predicted early, and makes a viewer wonder why it honestly didn’t end thirty minutes prior.

There are connections and themes that seem like they are trying to make themselves known in the film. There is a distinct connection between the main character and her traumatic past of losing her mother in a car accident she blames herself for, and the creatures that are in the forest that seem to be stuck there as some type of penance for maybe what they had done in ancient times. That the only way out of the forest is potentially by facing oneself and their own personal demons and learning how to move on from the past. However, these connections are threaded along a muddled plot, and require a lot of conjecture from an audience. While thematic threads do better in forms of subtlety, perhaps these are far too subtle, mixed in with plot holes and character leaps that don’t make sense once thought on for too long.

Ultimately, what the Watchers is able to provide in terms of its setting and tone, it loses by the end of the film while it attempts to resolve a mystery and a story it barely set up. While entertaining a first, it will most likely leave a viewer dissatisfied, and yet still, it remained in my mind for several days after viewing as I tried to parse out some of it’s mysterious and confusing elements.