**/****
starring Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan
screenplay by Ishana Night Shyamalan, based on the novel by A.M. Shine
directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan
by Walter Chaw Let’s get something straight: I love terrible movies like Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers, a handsomely mounted, well-cast, high-concept bit of folderol that swings wildly at a soft, underhand pitch…and misses. But you can’t fault the effort, the desire in that swing–the arrogance of it. It’s the hubristic brio of a Ken Griffey Jr. tearing a rotator cuff striking out at t-ball. M.’s daughter isn’t exactly the Mighty Casey, but the lead-up to The Watchers carries with it the same mythopoetics, the same anticlimactic denouement, the same whiff of mustiness that comes with a reference to Ernest Lawrence Thayer in 2024. Granted, that’s my fault for noticing it. I also thought a lot about “People Are Alike All Over,” that “Twilight Zone” episode where astronauts figure out they’re the new exhibits in an interstellar zoo, and another “Twilight Zone” called “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” in which five disparate individuals find themselves in a mysterious container, isolated from the outside world. I thought of Walter Kubilius’s incredible 1954 novella The Other Side, which influenced Peter Weir’s exceptional The Truman Show, and of Raymond Feist’s 1988 Faerie Tale, one of my all-time favourite horror novels. So hail to the skilled excavators, or at least the dedicated raiders of popular culture. Hail to the hyphenate debut that feels like something I picked up on 99¢ VHS rental Friday at King Soopers in 1991. Hail to nepotism working as it should by reintroducing the concept of the mid-level genre piece to curry favour with a former A-list director who keeps letting the air out of his own tires. And hail to the new “Night Shyamalan” who has learned her lessons exquisitely, the good and the bad. Just like that, she’s neatly doubled the number of directors of terrible movies I will like a little bit.
You know, what The Watchers reminded me of the most is the bookending seasons of “Lost”. That is to say, the first, in which a lot of checks are written, and the sixth, in which it becomes clear there’s no money in that account and there never ever was. Mina (Dakota Fanning) is a tremulous Sad Girl whose idea of going on a date involves borrowing an outfit from the local community theatre and cosplaying someone interesting. A clerk at a pet store, she takes a drive to deliver a parrot to someone, her car breaks down, and she wanders into a beautifully misty Irish wilderness, where Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), a creepy old Irish woman who looks like Olwen Fouéré, gestures for her to quick get into the cabin in a triangular clearing before night comes. Night, see, is when the Watchers arrive to look through the fourth wall of said cabin at Madeline, Ciara (Georgina Campbell), Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), and now Mina. “What do I do?” Mina asks. “Just be yourself,” says Madeline. “That’s all they want.” How does she know this? I don’t know. Later, we find out the Watchers want to observe and learn about humans, meaning they don’t know what a human being itself is, so… Madeline warns Mina never to turn her back to the Watchers’ two-way mirror but doesn’t say why, and when people do inevitably turn their back to the mirror, nothing happens. There are other rules of similar inconsequence, but the school of Shyamalan dictates that movies are rules, ergo, rules there must be, whether or not there’s anything to anchor these rules to logic or even each other.
For the Shyamalans, movies are not merely rules–they’re also boxes. Maybe they’re boxes made out of rules. Boxes hold surprises or nothing and have keys to open them (or knives to slice them open), but ultimately, alas, they are boxes. They just fucking sit there, and there’s a reason you stop playing with boxes. If you look at every movie as a list of instructions leading to the opening of a box of secrets, you not only get to enjoy a film exactly once, but you wipe away any necessity for or ability to engage in critical thought, too. Boxes teach you a single way to unlock them, and they sand off every edge and fill in every groove your brain’s evolved to identify and solve complex problems. Movies like The Watchers make your brain as smooth as a baby’s ass. Mina doesn’t want to be stuck in a box with these idiots for the “85 months” Ciara dreamily says she’s been trapped with nothing except an old DVD of a reality show to entertain her in the long dark hours, during which they’re not allowed to leave their box or turn their backs on the fourth wall–a time-honoured instruction for theatre actors that is sometimes ignored because, c’mon.
Is The Watchers a commentary on levels of performance, then? Mina’s romantic cosplays, her masking of trauma, her repressed twin (oh yes), and the long take of Mina cozying up to a wall-sized mirror would suggest so. Ibsen, this ain’t. Certainly it’s about doubles (literally, it’s about doubles)–even Mina’s name is a homonym for a bird renowned for its mimicry, and that’s without mentioning Mina’s clever parrot. How about her mission dovetailing with Tippi Hedren’s in The Birds? Is “Mina” short for “Melanie”? How about Madeline’s name recalling the phantom fatale in Hitchcock’s tale of doubles, Vertigo? How about all this Hitchcraft trainspotting echoing M. Night’s miles-wide-but-inches-deep infatuation with the Master of Suspense? Is The Watchers a commentary on how different media results in different representations of reality? I think “commentary” is doing a ton of work here, but sure. Eventually, Mina helps discover a secret trapdoor no one had managed to discover before, and like the portal in “Lost”, it leads to a disappointing discovery full of expository videos where a brilliant but mad researcher (John Lynch) known as “The Professor”–because this is kind of a callback to the more disturbing theocratic implications of “Gilligan’s Island”–gives an extended explanation of what’s going on. Box opened. Secret spilled. This is when the movie ends at a tidy 70 minutes. Val Lewton would approve. Like the proverbial beheaded chicken, however, The Watchers doesn’t have the sense to lie down for another 30 minutes yet.
So what’s the deal? What happens for another half-an-hour after all the secrets are learned and all the survivors have survived? More lore happens, for one; a gauzy reunion, a meaningful confrontation that would have been more meaningful had any stakes been established. What I get from The Watchers is mainly a love letter to a storyteller from a young woman raised on stories told this way by the storyteller, a doting father who seems incapable of telling stories any other way. It feels a lot like Super 8: Fanfic for the idol in the idol’s style, it can only really be judged as a cunning imitation that wouldn’t pass the Turing Test. I want to think the plot of The Watchers, in which faerie folk try with mixed success to imitate humans by watching them obsessively, is self-aware in the same way that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is knowingly using pieces cribbed from the styles and works of the Romanticists to tell the tale of a Monster composed of disparate body parts, but let’s not kid a kidder. The Watchers is a gorgeous husk of a movie–an Acanthaspis petax bug that wears the things that sustain it as a mask. With this one out of her system, Ishana Night Shyamalan needs to find her own voice before she puts herself into a tiny little box.
