Movie Review: ‘The Watchers’

NEW YORK (OSV News) – Will moviegoers want to watch “The Watchers” (Warner Bros.)? That largely depends on their tolerance for twaddle.

Bloodletting is kept to a minimum in writer-director Ishana Night Shyamalan’s horror tale, her feature debut. But so too, alas, is viewer interest.

Some woods are just not suitable for a teddy bears’ picnic. And such proves to be the case with the vast, uncharted forest in Western Ireland into which we follow Shyamalan’s protagonist, Mina (Dakota Fanning).

An emotionally troubled American living in Galway, Mina is too preoccupied with being miserable to devote much attention to her work as a pet shop attendant. Still, when her boss asks her to transport a rare tropical bird to a zoo in Belfast that wants to purchase it, she agrees readily enough.

Despite an opening voiceover that has previously assured us that the remote region that will serve as the film’s primary setting appears on no map, Mina is relying on GPS when her car abruptly breaks down in its midst. Ah, well, perhaps continuity is overrated.

Mina quickly cottons on to the fact that it’s not going to be easy to get out of the area and that being stranded there has left her subject to the mysterious predators who populate it. As they flit about, mostly unseen but audibly slobbering in a most unhealthy manner, Mina becomes understandably unnerved.

So when a stranger suddenly appears and offers her shelter, Mina is swift to accept. Her rescuer turns out to be stately matron Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), the strong-willed leader of a small household made up of people in a similar plight to Mina’s. Its other members are artsy sensitive type Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and callow youth Daniel (Oliver Finnegan).

Settling in, Mina learns the rules of survival in her new environment, most of them laid down by Madeline. They include the necessity of entertaining the creatures of the title by allowing them to observe the details of the group’s daily life through a one-way mirror. It’s all as claustrophobic as it is bizarre, however, and Mina continues to long for escape.

As adapted from A.M. Shine’s novel, Shyamalan’s script hints at an allegory about “Big Brother”-style voyeurism. Yet any such commentary remains underdeveloped and ultimately gets bogged down in a swampy morass of mythology at once so offhand and over-elaborate that it would have given H.P. Lovecraft a headache.

With proceedings more menacing than graphic, though, “The Watchers” is at least appropriate for a wider audience than many chillers. As for sexuality, an early sequence in which Mina disguises herself with a wig and goes forth to troll for bedroom companionship in a bar is both discreetly depicted and treated as a symptom of her unsettled state of despondency.

The film contains brief harsh violence with little gore, an offscreen casual encounter, at least one profanity, several milder oaths and a couple of instances each of crude and crass language. The OSV News classification is A-II — adults and adolescents. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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