‘The Watchers’ Review: Ishana Night Shyamalan’s Debut Is an Elegant Supernatural Horror Movie That Gets Lost in the Woods

A well-paced supernatural horror movie that’s built atop a high-concept premise, sustained by impressively elegant direction, hobbled by some of the clunkiest dialogue you’ve ever heard (to say nothing of the non-characters forced to speak it), and then undone by a twist ending so clearly telegraphed from the start that it might as well have been sent to the third act by Western Union, “The Watchers” offers ample evidence to suggest that first-time feature director Ishana Night Shyamalan — of the M. Night Shyamalans — probably wasn’t the most rebellious of children.

If there’s much about her debut that left me wishing the apple had fallen a little further from the tree, there’s also no denying that the “Unbreakable” filmmaker’s daughter has the skill to follow in her father’s footsteps, which she does here even when the material is begging her to blaze her own trail. And yet, frustrating as it can be at times, the young Shyamalan’s loyal devotion to the family brand proves strangely appropriate for a story this fraught with parental baggage, parroted behavior, and the life-or-death need to satisfy the expectations of an audience who will tear you apart the minute you turn your back on them. 

In “The Watchers,” that audience has claws big enough to scratch permanent scrape marks into a pane of bullet-proof glass. Those violent grooves are the first thing we notice about the brutalist concrete building where Mina (a sullen but headstrong Dakota Fanning) takes shelter after her car breaks down in an unmarked forest somewhere between Galway — where the downtrodden expat works at a pet store, vaping her pain away during breaks — and Belfast, where she’s been tasked with delivering a golden parrot to a customer.

The chatty bird doesn’t offer our heroine much help once the sun begins to set and the woods start growling at her, but a silver-haired woman named Madeline (Olwen Fouéré) appears at the last minute to spirit Mina inside a one-room lodge that we’ll come to know as “The Coop.” The door is sealed tighter than the hatch on a submarine, the DVD selection is sadistic, and the wall-to-wall window that stretches across one side of the building turns into a two-way mirror every night. That’s when the Watchers come. That’s when Madeline, Daniel (Oliver Finnegan as a local teen scrapper), and Ciara (“Barbarian” star Georgina Campbell) line up in front of the glass as if it were a screen or the proscenium of a theater stage and do their best to keep the unseen crowd entertained. As we can surmise by the absence of Ciara’s husband, there are severe consequences for those who fail to follow the rules. 

Don’t go out after dark. Never wander too far into the woods. Stay away from the burrows where the creatures sleep during the daytime, and always do what you can to put on a good show for them at night. Shyamalan’s adaptation is extremely faithful to the plot and tradition of the 2022 A.M. Shine novel on which it’s based, but only in a way that leaves you wondering how much his book might have borrowed from “The Village” in the first place.

Where the elder Shyamalan’s movie adopted the look and language of a 19th-century Pennsylvania commune, Ishana’s decidedly modern take riffs on the panopticon-like voyeurism of reality TV. Mina’s voiceover describes the forest around the Coop as a place that “draws in lost souls like moths to a flame,” and the same could be said of “Love Island” (or the “Love Island” knock-off that Mina is forced to watch over and over again on DVD as her time in the Watchers’ domain stretches on), which similarly encourages people to indulge in their worst selves for a viewing audience that loathes and envies them in equal measure.

It’s easy for Mina to be her worst self, as she’s convinced that it’s the only part of her that survived childhood; the details fall under spoiler territory, but it’s safe to say that Mina’s self-loathing guilt is what motivated her to move across the ocean and freeze out her sister, whose phone voice sounds exactly like Fanning’s. That self-loathing is also what makes her fearless enough to push against the Watchers’ boundaries (what else does she have to lose?), even when her fellow exhibits would sooner turn on each other than risk upsetting those angry creatures in the dark. 

Shyamalan is far more interested in exploring the woods than she is in fleshing out any of her characters (Daniel ran away from an abusive dad, Madeline used to be a teacher, Ciara likes to dance… the end), but her film is well-served by playing to its strengths, and “The Watchers” is at its most grippingly tense whenever Mina goes looking for trouble. The mystery of the forest is unraveled with the patience and precision of a storyteller who inherited her father’s belief that what we don’t see is always scarier and more interesting than what we do, and while the nerve-shredding sequences where Mina spelunks through the burrows or stays out of the Coop all night can be overly reliant on jump-scares, those jolts are rooted in a solid foundation of well-earned suspense (and further supported by the inviting flatness of Fanning’s devil-may-care affect). 

Shyamalan also shares her father’s penchant for classicism, and her painterly framing — along with Abel Korzeniowski’s spiraling violin score — helps to prevent the movie’s clear and present dangers from overshadowing the more ancient nature of its secrets. Even in its darkest stretches, “The Watchers” is soaked in moody blues that separate it from so much horror dreck. Even in its most generic moments, Shyamalan’s film is fringed with Irish myth in a way that suggests the story might not fall to ribbons the second that Mina starts to figure things out. 

But it does. Fast. And with a maddening disregard for why the first half of this movie was intriguing in ways that had nothing to do with its central mystery. After carefully teasing out breadcrumbs of information over the course of an hour, “The Watchers” flies the Coop before it convinces to care about the people caged inside of it — only to waste its stockpile of intrigue on a labored and nonsensical series of info dumps that confirm your worst suspicions at the same time as they deny viewers the chance to entertain any new ones. 

If Shine’s novel suffered from a similar problem, Shyamalan doesn’t make any effort to smooth it out. The sudden onslaught of exposition displaces whatever mild investment this movie has earned in its characters until that point, and the decision to resolve the main conflict after only 75 minutes or so makes it all too obvious that “The Watchers” is saving time for its big twist, blunting its impact even as Shyamalan teases the reveal — and a sequel! — at the expense of fleshing out what any of this could mean for our heroine. 

Hinging on clumsy flashbacks and delivered without an ounce of the necessary oomph, that last reveal forces Mina to take stock of her own monstrousness in a way that might have added up in a film more interested in such moral arithmetic, but “The Watcher” falls flat at the precise moment it decides to sprout wings. I don’t find it helpful to belabor the “nepo baby” of it all when it comes to a filmmaker as skilled and promising as Ishana Shyamalan, and “The Watchers” gives me hope that her interest in fantasy might eventually steer her out of her father’s shadow, not least of all because this debut is ultimately so determined to reconcile the reality of who people are with the legends they were born into. I won’t tell you if Mina is able to accomplish that in the end, but I will tell you that Shyamalan still has a ways to go.

Grade: C

Warner Bros. will release “The Watchers” in theaters on Friday, June 7.