Based on A.M. Shine’s creepy folk horror novel The Watchers (which has its own sequel out later this year), The Watched (as it’s been retitled for UK and Northern Ireland) is the debut feature from Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of the prodigious, but erratic, M. Night. It’s an intriguing choice of first project, certainly one that doesn’t betray the family preponderance for dark, twisty horror tales designed to second-guess the audience. The Watched doesn’t always hit the spot as it occasionally runs out of energy, but it’s an impressive calling card that allows the director to demonstrate that she’s as at home with building a sense of dread and creeping menace as she is at delivering strategic jump scares and images of stark, striking horror.
Shine’s novel was an occasionally sluggish, overwrought affair. Shyamalan (who also wrote the script) has stripped away a lot of the narrative flab and focused on the core story of Mina (Dakota Fanning), an American living in Ireland who is still coping with the trauma of causing the death of her mother when she was a child. She works in a pet shop and is tasked by her boss with delivering a valuable bird to a customer across the country. Her car breaks down in a supernaturally huge forest. The car seems to disappear, and she encounters Madeleine (Olwen Fouere), an old woman watching her from nearby. With night falling, Mina takes refuge in a bunker-like building called ’The Coop’ alongside Madeleine and two other occupants. They explain that they are trapped in the bunker, observed at night by nocturnal creatures called ‘Watchers.’ Mina soon finds out that that’s no way out of the forest and that the Watchers, who are afraid of the light, will kill anyone outside the Coop at night. Days, months and seasons pass, and the four remain trapped in the Coop, turning on one another and becoming increasingly suspicious of one another. But in time, they discover the secrets of both the Coop and the Watchers and work to find a way out of the forest forever,
Despite the chamber-piece nature of its central conceit, The Watched is an ambitious and unusual piece of storytelling. Shyamalan clearly revels in evoking a sense of claustrophobia both inside the Coop and outside in the endless forest, and the Watchers themselves, wisely kept off-screen for much of the film, are an ever-present, terrifying threat that is all the better for being kept in the shadows and the darkness. The balance of the film seems uneven as both tone and locale shift in the last act, but that’s as much an issue with the original novel as it is with Shyamalan’s screenplay, which manages to make the nature and origins of the Watchers clearer and more plausible than in the novel.
With its nimble running time (just 100 minutes), The Watched is long enough to do what it needs to do without testing the audience’s patience. It allows Shyamalan to build on the tricks she’s clearly learned from her father while suggesting that she has a pretty firm grasp on the genre and how to draw the best out of what is, here, a potentially tricky and uninvolving story. It also suggests that she has a very bright future in the world of the dark and mysterious.
THE WATCHED is in UK cinemas now
