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Ishana Night Shyamalan\u2019s directorial debut is built around storytelling instincts turned in the wrong directions<\/p>\n
An important thing to know going into The Watchers<\/em>, the feature directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, is that it isn\u2019t a horror movie \u2014 it\u2019s folkloric fantasy. That distinction will only matter to people who watched an initial trailer<\/a> and walk in expecting a focus on scares and violence, instead of on unpacking the mystery and history around the movie\u2019s titular Watchers. Anyone who goes in with the wrong expectations will probably just find The Watchers<\/em> baffling. It has its share of creepy moments, rising tension, and sudden-blast-of-music jump scares, but as a suspense story, it fizzles out surprisingly early.<\/p>\n That may be because the story beats are lined up in a bewildering order, guaranteed to drop the movie\u2019s tension from one act to the next instead of escalating it. While it\u2019d be difficult for any movie to live up to The Watchers<\/em>\u2019 opening premise, Shyamalan\u2019s version of A.M. Shine\u2019s 2022 novel<\/a> does a particularly poor job of paying off the early promise of the story\u2019s setup.<\/p>\n The premise is unusual enough to be intriguing: Mina (Dakota Fanning), a Galwegian pet store worker still harboring deep emotions about her mother\u2019s death 15 years earlier, gets lost in a forest, where she\u2019s clearly being manipulated by beings with supernatural powers. She eventually reaches a glass-fronted shelter roughly the size of a shipping trailer, where three other people: Ciara (Georgina Campbell), Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), and Madeline (Olwen Fou\u00e9r\u00e9) have been living. At night, they lock themselves into the shelter (which they call \u201cthe Coop\u201d) and unseen creatures come to stare at them. During the day, the creatures hide in burrows, and the captives are free to roam the forest \u2014 but they believe that if they go too far and get caught outside at night, their captors will kill them.<\/p>\n Most of The Watchers<\/em>\u2019 appeal comes from all the mysteries in this setup: wondering what the Watchers are and what they want, what secrets the other three captives are hiding, who will inevitably crack first under the pressure the eerie situation puts the group under, and how Mina\u2019s arrival will upset the status quo. The sharp, high-contrast cinematography (from Lamb<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Eli Arenson) gives these opening chapters a winningly oppressive look, with the golden glow of the Coop extending out into the deep blues and blacks of the nighttime woods. The constant effect of the Coop\u2019s mirrored wall gives the characters an eerie set of duplicates hovering nearby at all times, which Shyamalan and Arenson use to create a hyper-real but still fable-like atmosphere that\u2019s often haunting and unsettling. <\/p>\n One visual conceit in particular \u2014 foregrounding the mirror images, while diminishing the actual characters and turning them into afterthoughts \u2014 is a clever, eerie trick that hints at the film\u2019s larger theme, around duplication. Mina\u2019s parrot, a golden conure, periodically repeats things she says. Mina has a twin (also played by Fanning), who she\u2019s pushed out of her life. Early on, Mina starts seeing an image of herself as a little girl off in the woods, an initial hint of the Watchers\u2019 powers and intentions. But that theme never fully coheres in a satisfying or surprising element: It\u2019s all scattered foreshadowing for a reveal that\u2019s given away early, then repeated over and over in a way that keeps diminishing its impact.<\/p>\n Everything about The Watchers<\/em>\u2019 story and structure seems designed for exactly that sense of diminishing returns. The most compelling mysteries are quickly resolved, mostly through exposition. The tensest part of the movie is similarly resolved long before most cinephiles would expect it to, giving way to more exposition. The film\u2019s third act largely consists of research, reading, and characters telling each other things the audience already knows, but in portentous tones, as if that might add significance. It\u2019s honestly confusing, waiting for the other shoe to drop, then realizing there is no other shoe, just a protracted unraveling of the movie\u2019s initial tension.<\/p>\n In theory, the structure could be viewed as a shift from general stakes to personal ones, and from a broad threat to a specific one. In practice, the movie lets its scariest elements go long before the finale, and replaces them with a tediously slow procedural building up to a poorly paced, badly mismanaged conversation. There\u2019s real potential in the story elements here, but they all seem to come in the wrong order, and in some cases, in the wrong locale. It\u2019s as if Shyamalan is trying to tell a story that\u2019s distinctive, different, and unpredictable, but winds up with something mostly distinctive in how badly it misses the basic elements of a thriller. <\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to imagine a version of this film structured in the opposite order, where a character learns enough about the Watchers\u2019 history and intent to make them more frightening when they appear, and the \u201ctrapped in the Coop\u201d scenario lasts longer, feels more central, and is allowed to build the suspense up to the breaking point. It\u2019s much harder to understand how anyone thought a movie could hold on to an audience once all the peril gives way to characters giving speeches and watching videos. <\/p>\n Maybe going in with those expectations in mind will help: When a story is built entirely out of fear of the unknown<\/a>, it\u2019s preposterously difficult to stick the landing without eventually disappointing the audience<\/a>. But even forewarned and forearmed, The Watchers<\/em> is a strange experience, like watching a fairly solid supernatural suspense movie, then spending half an hour reading the footnotes. <\/p>\n The Watchers<\/em><\/small> is in theaters now.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Image: Warner Bros.\/Everett Collection Ishana Night Shyamalan\u2019s directorial debut is built around storytelling instincts turned in the wrong directions An important thing to know going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1959"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1959"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1966,"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1959\/revisions\/1966"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Mina](\"https:\/\/canvasholidays.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/MCDWATC_WB016.jpg\")
\n Image: Warner Bros.\/Everett Collection<\/cite>
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\n Image: Warner Bros.\/Everett Collection<\/cite>
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\n Image: Warner Bros.\/Everett Collection<\/cite>
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