The Watched – Review

Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 42 minutes, Director – Ishana Night Shyamalan

Confined to a small box in the middle of a never-ending forest a group of strangers (Dakota Fanning, Olwen Fouéré, Georgina Campbell, Oliver Finnegan) plan to escape the unseen creatures known only as The Watchers.

It’s difficult to be confined to a small box with a group of unlikable people, with no sign of escape. The Watched deals with two out of three of these ideas, leaving the being stuck with unlikable characters part for the audience to deal with. The main course at hand for the central quartet (Dakota Fanning, Olwen Fouéré, Georgina Campbell and Oliver Finnegan) is escaping the never-ending forest they’ve all been trapped in for an indeterminate amount of time. However, escape is only possible during the day, amongst a seemingly repeating and daze-inducing landscape, or else a group of unseen creatures known as The Watchers will take the lives of those still outside. The only safety is in the almost empty concrete hut known as ‘The Coop’ where the four are watched through a giant two-way mirror each night by the creatures.

Our main introduction is to Fanning’s Mina, spending her evenings pretending to be someone else, her day job is in a pet shop. Sent to take a bird to a zoo, her car breaks down on a long journey and it’s not long until night begins to fall and she’s brought into The Coop for safety. We find out little about the three figures she’s stuck with. While Fouéré’s Madeline has some detail as the rule-enforcer (and frequent breaker in forgetting not to turn her back on The Watchers) who has been trapped the longest, whereas Clara (Campbell) and Daniel (Finnegan) have barely any detail and therefore little to connect with.

It’s difficult to connect with any of the few characters partly down to their initial actions and behaviours which may be in place to create an initial distance between them, but also pushes back the audience as well. However, the lack of detail, and in some ways development, also acts as a key factor in a lack of connection and proper engagement with their attempts to leave.

There may be occasional sparks of hope and interest when hinting at the workings of the forest, however these are rare with focus being more on mystery and just what The Watchers might be. 10 Cloverfield Lane feels like a touchstone, however The Watched lacks that film’s sense of mystery and paranoia. Instead we simply see a cycle of night into day with mentions of previous escape attempts and The Watchers apparently getting angrier before things start to develop more in the second half.

Developments which seem to arrive quickly before revealing a more drawn out set of events as the actual ending. Jumping back in to a more mainstream-leaning feel; just like where things start out before, once in the forest, leaning into a more specific indie vibe. In the end it starts to feel as if there’s a lack of uncertainty as to where to truly pitch the film as it starts to go back and forth between two different styles depending on how much it wants to deal with the, in some places titular, Watchers. Even with this being the case the various elements of the film still feel familiar and as if we’ve seen them done better before; and with more detail.

There’s a chance for interest within the figures of the Watchers, but the expansion and detail that goes into them comes late in the day with little impact. If worked more into the narrative there’s chance for a fantastical horror and a stronger sense of eeriness to the confines which the characters must remain in each night. As it stands, there’s a lack of detail within The Watched, particularly surrounding the difficult-to-connect-with characters and their hostilities, which prevents it from properly exploring its ideas and making for a more fleshed-out and interesting horror which rises above a couple of brief sparks of creepiness.

If The Watched brought its thematic developments in earlier and crafted the narrative around those there might be a more effective horror playing out, however what we get is a film lacking in creeps and detail, unhelped by a set of bland characters.