The enduring irony of M. Night Shyamalan’s cinema is that no matter how much he believes in the power and magic of storytelling, he nearly always struggles to spin a good yarn. The tin-eared dialogue, the crude sentimentality, and the compulsive overreliance on tension and startling-for-their-own-sake (and often tension-deflating) left turns are all part of what we’ve come to understand as distinctly Shyamalan-esque. And now, they’re present and accounted for in The Watchers, the debut feature of his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan.
Dakota Fanning stars as Mina, an American living in Galway, Ireland, who spends her time, no doubt as a consequence of her traumatic past, donning wigs and lying to men in bars between shifts at the local pet shop. When she’s tasked with delivering a gorgeous golden conure parrot to a zoo in Belfast, Mina takes the opportunity for some time away but, when her car breaks down, finds herself and her feathered companion stranded in a remote expanse of eerie woods.
There, Mina encounters Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), and Ciara (Georgina Campbell), who rush her into an imposing concrete structure as night falls to protect her from the supernatural titular creatures that inhabit the forest. Believing that escape is an impossibility, Mina tries to figure out how to appease the mysterious beings observing them from the other side of the structure’s mirrored window, all while she becomes desperate to understand why the watchers are watching them in the first place.
Having directed six episodes of the Amazon series Servant and worked as second unit director on her father’s 2021 film Old, Ishana Night Shyamalan already knows a thing or two about crafting an image. That’s certainly evident in the shots of the wild, untamed woods that thrum with tension, and the wide-eyed expressions of her cast bathed in the warm, lonely light of their secluded refuge. Pity, then, that the screenplay is most successful at signaling that the 24-year-old filmmaker has inherited all of her father’s storytelling quirks and peccadillos.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by Irish author A.M. Shine, The Watchers is rooted in Celtic folklore, but Shyamalan’s script is uncertain about what it wants to say about that myth. Throughout, should-be-shiver-inducing lines like “If you care if you’re alive you’re going to have to run” are mostly just awkward-sounding, probably because the characters are otherwise speaking the film’s themes aloud. Which is to say, the filmmaker shares dear old dad’s own storytelling crutch of voluble overstatement. Pacing is a conspicuous problem and the rushed third act threatens to crumble as The Watchers becomes overloaded with revelations and mythology that strain a foundation barely braced to hold their weight.
The younger Shyamalan cites Lady in the Water as her favorite of her father’s works, so it’s easy to see why Shine’s world of ancient magic lurking just beyond the fringes of our workaday reality appealed to the filmmaker. Though The Watchers may not add anything to the ongoing conversation about privilege versus talent, the film’s clumsy surprises and world-building will be a source of familiar comfort to Shyamalan die-hards and routine frustration to anyone else.
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