In the category of pretty weird yet fascinating screenplays and thrillers, Shyamalan is almost synonymous with the word itself. While M. Night is the current bearer of this surname, his daughter Ishana wishes to take on this family legacy within the next generation and carve a niche out for herself in a parallel space. Touted as A. M. Shine’s book adaptations; ‘The Watchers’ is Ishana Night Shyamalan’s first directorial work, a fictional story filled with imaginative hope and horror that is haphazardly ambitious in style.
Madeline, Ciara, and Daniel have spent months in isolation in the depths of the impenetrable and inescapable forest that darkness descends upon them before they can find their way out. Even now, all their survival, and now even Mina’s too, depends on an easy understanding, which has only the foremost goal that is to get into the coop before the night descends, and also be there to be called by the watchers when they arrive. The day is safe. The night, however, is not safe, and disobedience to the laws of the day is understood to be death, quite a violent one as well.
With “The Watchers,” Shyamalan clearly bites off much more than she can chew. The substrate of the source material provides much to build around in terms of worldbuilding, set pieces, and character development, but the limitations of Shyamalan’s toolset is brutally put on display. “The Watchers” is short on creativity and guts and has only the most awkward of scripts to rely on. It is riddled with disengaged dialogues and a halfhearted attempt at the genre, that it is hard to comprehend or appreciate its overall style or age classification. Madeline’s character repeatedly admonishes the readers about the gory violence of the watchers which however the movie is too deficient to engender. It has no bite. The stylistic choices are more suited for arcade-like OLDTOWN which is a relatively child-friendly horror with the tongue in cheek stylings of The Haunted Mansion and Some scenes with bloodshed in the style of James Wan’s Insidious movies. In the case of Shyamalan’s work this fixation is a notably damaging one, as it changes the fundamental themes of the story. The watchers are never macabre in design, of course.
The actual design of the forest creatures becomes quite good in the dark.
The shadows and missing details at the beginning provide a certain tension and sell the scare, but Shyamalan makes the ordinary error of bringing them into light and substituting horror with the blandness of a clichéd look. The only exception is when the watchers have got closer to their final version advancing towards the uncanny valley where it is not perfect but good enough.
While “The Watchers” can be further classified under the genre of science fiction, it is interesting how the thematic content is constructed around duplication and voyeurism. Shyamalan tries to balance values of individuality with Darwinism-from Mina’s almost forgotten twin, the cheerful parrot she carries from the pet shop, to the creators of the lore of the watchers. The coop also acts as a set and the only media that is available to the group is a series ‘Love Island’ one season long on DVD that the group refers to the Lair of Love. There is no doubt that the picture of an estranged group packed together in one room for other’s amusement is clear, but the statement is not.
One theory is that Shyamalan is making a more meta critique of performance through the coop, of the kinds of performative behaviors and quotable that reality television seems to have permeated or perhaps how we construct ourselves on the bases of celebrity. But the fragility of her pen leaves this as a theory rather than as something more fully developed reasoning.
In “The Watchers,” the performances are compromised by a poorly constructed script and a multitude of annoying line deliveries. Even the characters seem to be a bit lost when they’re speaking, and as we scratch our heads as to who the watchers really are, the center of the attention seems drowned in a puddle of miscommunication. This exposition dialogue fights against characters articulating their inner monologue, which is a very limited canvas for actors to work on in terms of subtleties. Mina’s inner void which Fanning portrays has her strong and serious covering up her pain as a defense mechanism, but she appears bland in scenes that needed more fire and anguish. Another actress whose role in the horror universe is slowly apparent in “Barbarian” “Black Mirror” and “Bird Box” is Campbell, who is arguably the most engaging and the fact that she has the least lines is probably why she is the most interesting to watch.
When watching “The Watchers” one hardly should expect to have a space to breath as quite the opposite one is thrown into the deep end and is expected to sink with the lore, the dialogue as well as the over exaggerated story. Shyamalan is confused if he’s presenting a story that has a message or one that’s scary and as a result loses out on so much potential in the film. Yes there are some ideas, some attempts at having some form of depth but simply put, these are very weak and the film is not strong enough to hold its own. One of the questions raised in “The Watchers” is very interesting and is never completely answered, looking at a director who has ambitions but is still very early in her career.
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