Image © Warner Bros.
The Watchers
The Watchers
Some cranks were happy to dismiss Jakob Dylan because his father’s name is Bob. Doubtlessly, the hacks of London’s Fleet Street cut no slack for Martin Amis because his dad was Kingsley. And remember how they pounced on Sofia Coppola?
The same is happening to Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of one of the more interesting paranormal directors of recent decades. M. Night Shyamalan produced his writer-director daughter’s debut film, The Watchers, and the mindless punditry spoke darkly of nepotism. Well, that’s the way of the world. The real question should be: is Ishana’s movie any good?
Answer: yes, remarkably for a first-time filmmaker, albeit The Watchers looks very much like the work of the elder Shyamalan. The protagonist is an American girl in Ireland, Mina (Dakota Fanning), working in a pet shop. She’s disaffected, an artist who draws, vapes and wears disguises and false names for flings with strange men in bars. Eventually, the puzzle pieces of her trauma fit together. She feels responsible for her mother’s death, 15 years earlier.
Mina is tasked with delivering a rare parrot to a zoo in Ulster. En route, she drives along a winding road into a forest that doesn’t exist, not in our world. Her phone signal disintegrates, her GPS dissolves and her car’s electronics dies. She’s stuck in a disorienting environment, a forbidding woodland with trees thorny and dark in the perpetual twilight. Half-seen shapes dart across the snapping underbrush. The forest teems with the murmur of unseen life. Mina spots a bunker-like structure with windows and a steel door, and a white-haired woman, Madeline (Olwen Fouere), pleading with her to hurry—the sun is setting and there is danger in the night.
Once inside, Madeline introduces Mina to a pair of people her own age, Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), and brusquely describes the situation: “We call them the Watchers,” she says, unexplained entities who come to the windows each night to observe them. They must line up as if for inspection. “It’s not wise to keep them waiting,” Madeline adds, sensing the new girl’s hesitation. “They’ll be interested in someone new.”
Mina’s stubborn, rebellious streak (which triggered her mother’s death) shows itself when she refuses to obey Madeline’s rules about where to go and not to go during daylight. There are repercussions from her refusal. The fragile bond of holding together the community inside the bunker (they call it “the Coop”) threatens to fracture and the Watchers will be angry … But then again, no one has questioned the laws of Madeline. Who can say that she knows what’s really going on … or is she holding something back? Like a Chinese puzzle box (or an M. Night film), there are secrets within secrets.
Spoiler: Madeline eventually confesses to having been a professor of comparative folklore and mythology with a special interest in the “fairies” of Ireland. In the old tales, those fairies weren’t the cute pixies of Victorian children’s books. They were often malign creatures at cross purposes with humanity forming an invisible commonwealth in a world hidden alongside our own. When she finally shows those creatures, Ishana wisely depicts them in the shadows, spindly silhouettes in the dark night.
The Watchers is intriguing from the get-go and spellbinding though the end. Perhaps to avoid criticism for taking after the old man, Ishana might have debuted instead in a different genre altogether—a romantic comedy with nary a hint of the uncanny?
