NOTE: The Watched is the UK tile for The Watchers…the most generous explanation being that Watched puts emphasis on the protagonists rather than the antagonists…
Adapted from A.M. Shine’s novel The Watchers, horror film The Watched is distributed by Warner Bros. When Mina (Dakota Fanning) breaks down whilst driving through rural Ireland, she ends up lost in woods with supernatural qualities and a history of missing people. There she finds a small concrete structure known as ‘The Coop’, one wall of which is a panoramic one-way mirror, that is occupied by Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). At night-time, they are observed in ‘The Coop’ by the mysterious and deadly beings that occupy the woods, but cannot come out of their burrow during daylight hours. With Madeline having given up hope of ever finding a way out of the forest, can Mina find a way for them to escape?
PROS
- A good lead in Dakota Fanning, whilst Olwen Fouéré gives a nuanced and suitably chilling performance that puts a consistent sense of mystery around Madeline.
- Cinematographer Eli Arenson uses the confined space of ‘The Coop’ to create an effective sense of claustrophobia; and combines a cold colour palette and the sheer density of the trees in the forest to create an eerie setting in which it is wholly plausible that people could become trapped and lost.
CONS
- Uncertain direction from Ishana Night Shyamalan (daughter of M. Night) as she struggles to find a balance between character development and the mystery regarding the Watchers, but ultimately she also tries to emulate her father’s directorial style rather than establish her own one.
- Severe pacing issues, due in part to the shortcomings of Ishana Night Shyamalan’s direction, but also thanks to a number of scenes in her surprisingly episodic screenplay ending very abruptly, a lack of urgency in the climax, and an epilogue with a stilted pace.
- Despite keeping jump scares to a minimum, Ishana Night Shyamalan is too dependent on well-worn clichés and tropes of the horror genre.
- Georgina Campbell and Oliver Finnegan give considerably weaker performances than those of Dakota Fanning and Olwen Fouéré, having wooden line delivery and lacking both the full emotional range for their characters and the necessary chemistry with each other.
- In both the early glimpses of parts of the Watchers’ bodies and in the depictions of them and their abilities in full, the conceptual designs are uninspired and not that creepy (due to an unbalanced combination of horror monsters and Celtic folklore), whilst the CGI used for them is poor quality.
VERDICT: 3/10
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