REVIEW: The Watchers (2024)

Movie Reviews

I had no idea what to expect from The Watchers. I don’t think I saw any trailers, I haven’t read A. M. Shine’s novel, and I actually thought M. Night Shyamalan directed the movie. He only produced it, and it was directed by his daughter, Ishana Night Shyamalan. The Watchers feels inspired by her father’s work, which is hardly surprising when she’s credited on some of his films. The Watchers has a creepy tone and mythical elements that feel like something M. Night would absolutely do. With that being said, is it any good? Let’s find out. 

The Watchers follows a young woman named Mina (Dakota Fanning), a pet store worker who gets sent to deliver a bird. She ruminates on her troubled past while driving through the misty Irish countryside until her car shuts down and she gets lost. She comes across three other missing travelers (Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, and Oliver Finnegan) who take her in and tell her the rules: Every night, they’re all observed from sunset to sunrise by the Watchers. They must stay inside after dark and avoid the Watchers’ dens. Our heroes slowly learn more about their observers and the entity that constructed the bunker they inhabit. What Mina learns will shock her and just might help her deal with her own demons. 

The cinematography in The Watchers is good. This movie will not change the way you view film, but there’s some clever work with mirrors, and the Irish forests and towns glimmer with charm. The music by Abel Korzeniowski is gorgeous and evocative, which should come as no surprise. He has plenty of film and TV credits, but all I need to know is that he wrote Penny Dreadful’s creepy, emotional score. That’s one of a handful of soundtracks I used to play in my car, and I thought I heard something similar in The Watchers. 

I was wrong in assessing the movie’s central message. At one point, I was convinced The Watchers was a treatise on the dangers of AI mimicking and replacing us as people. A line of dialogue about how the Watchers can’t recreate human fingers reinforced this idea in my mind. Anyway, the way one of the Watchers is treated tells me this isn’t it. It’s grayer than that, with room for good and bad on both sides. This movie is more about mythology, coexistence, and the struggle between differing parties to get on. Can we accept differences, or do we just shut out anything different? I admit I find this a little less interesting and more predictable, but that’s alright. The movie handles it well enough for what it is. 

The acting in the movie is okay, for the most part, but my favorite performance comes from Olwen Fouéré as Madeline. She’s the most exciting and enigmatic, constantly making me guess how she knows so much. Dakota Fanning works well enough as the lead, Mina. She conveys the right emotions, and her character changes the most in the movie. This is another facet of The Watchers that echoes the work of the senior Shyamalan; Mina’s struggles in the present with the Watchers and her housemates help her work through the trauma in her childhood. This reminded me a lot of Signs or Split. I wish they had done more with Danny (Oliver Finnegan) and Ciara (Georgina Campbell), Mina and Madeline’s other roommates in the woods. Ciara, especially, has quite a bit of screen time, yet we don’t get to know her as a character. She suffers a tremendous loss early on but can’t seem to decide if she’s grieving or not. I want to be fair here, and in real life, grief isn’t usually a neat, linear process. But for the purpose of the movie and Ciara’s story, it feels weird to see her dancing and laughing in one scene and overwhelmed with loss in the next. Maybe this wouldn’t be so jarring if it was part of her character, something that gets addressed. But as presented, she makes no sense as a character.

The Watchers doesn’t have many characters to juggle, so I’m not sure why Ciara gets muddled like this and Danny is ignored. I honestly think there’s more of a narrative thread with Mina’s bird than two of the four central characters. Mina’s boss emphasizes how loyal this type of bird is. Mina is initially rude to the poor critter, but she gets attached as the film goes on. This is satisfying and feeds back into Mina’s arc despite being a little obvious. This is a nitpick, but I don’t like that Dakota Fanning plays both Mina and her sister Lucy. It would have been cool to cast Elle Fanning as Lucy because Dakota’s performances aren’t that different or interesting. Having an actor double up on roles is only interesting if it serves the story somehow or highlights their talent. I think they did this to avoid paying another actress and because Lucy isn’t in the movie a ton. 

There’s one more thing I want to talk about: the idea of reality TV and being watched all the time. The housemates have one DVD available, an Australian reality show where young, beautiful people pair up and compete as couples. A parallel is drawn between Mina and her new friends watching this program and the Watchers watching them. These people are essentially a reality TV show for the Watchers, living their boring lives under surveillance and trying to spice it up to get a positive reaction. It’s strange how the Watchers watch for a specific reason, though. The people in the compound watch this show because it’s all they have. I don’t see how the information gleaned from watching these people relates to regular reality TV viewers. I don’t like reality TV, but I don’t think the people watching it are evil or creepy. Either this idea isn’t fleshed out well in the movie, or I’m missing something crucial. 

Overall, The Watchers is okay, but the good side of okay, I think. There are good ideas and decent performances here, but I think the script needed one more draft. The Watchers could have been something special with some polishing, but as it is, it’s worth seeing once.