The Watchers
With respect to strange and amazing thrillers, Shyamalan is already a brand of sorts. What other polarisation can M. Night the current bearer of this particular last name be, apart from presenting the example to his daughter. The film is directed by A. M. Shine and is a fable filled with adventure but unfortunately lacks a level of tact, where the plot oscillates between child-like magic and tired horror.
Mina (Dakota Fanning) is a character whose soul is lost. She is a young American in her twenties living in Galway who passes the daytime in a pet store and entertains herself at night in the bars as different characters. When her car breaks down in the heart of a woodland maze where every direction seems to be the wrong one, Mina has no option but to look for assistance. Even as darkness encroaches, and as the birds perching in the trees go into a flurry of frantic activity, the only living entity left seems to be her. The woods become vile, ominous, and sinister, now and then with something hunting behind. Avoiding her car, which has disappeared from view, Mina starts to run and finds herself at a small bunker with a door behind which sits a woman. It is Madeleine (Olwen Fouere), who brings her inside.
Living too in this bunker, which they call ‘The Coop’ are Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) The Jeer’s Milliter is constructed of three walls around to three walls and a large one way glass, which is used by the watchers as a source of rejoicing for the animal inhabitants of the forest in which they dwell. Every evening, the groups needs to look out to them through the window whilst inspiring in them urges to look at them as though they were idle mannequins, lined up and ready to be gazed at through shop windows.
Madeline, Ciara, and Daniel have spent ages trapped inside the forest and its confusing arrangement and unconquerable thickness makes it nearly impossible to escape by nightfall. And now Mina respondents are restricted by a few plain rules including coming to the coop before it is dark, and going out to welcome the watchers at the designated hour. Day is secure. but night is dangerous and if one does not comply it is made clear that somewhere, somehow, a very painful and bloody demise will await such an aberration.
The Watchers is where Shyamalan really chews more than she is able to swallow. Although there is much fun to be had when it comes to the story development and adaptation with respect to the world structure, types of the scenery and the characters, Shyamalan’s modest toolbox is brutalistically suppressed. The vision and the guts of the creators are missing from “The Watchers”-, the story is only held by the crumpled script. With shallow conversations and half hearted genre dispositions, it tries to find its own voice and grown up appeal. The only variation in Madeleine’s character is through her continual admonish against the excessive forceful bleeding heart watchers but the script hardly convinces you of any such thing. It has no impact. The creative narrations are similar to the child friendly animation style seen in the park, but this one also has some parts which try as much as possible to be as blood thirsty as possible, drawing inspiration from “Insidious.” The incident in ‘The Watchers’ works well if Shyamalan takes in some elements of mysticism more than horror. But here when she has to come with relevant colours it’s like a blind fold and she is free to pick any cherry and “The Watchers” becomes a flimsy as a result.
Some of the forest creatures designs are rather interesting to notice in the dark.
The night scenes filled with outlines and snippets amplify the tension and help us get into the horror factor, but then Shyamalan goes back to a mistake made long ago and puts them in the light, taking away the monstrosity and substituting it for a too familiar trope. What is out of place here, is when the watchers are very close to the watchers themselves after transformation but still being in this disgusting valley which is a bad valley but ok.
‘The Watchers’ deals with the issues of the same characters adaptation and voyeurism within the film. In the case of the dominants in Mina’s life her almost mentioned twin sister, the mimicking parrot from the pet shop she bears around with her throughout the movie, and the story of the watchers Shyamalan combines concepts of individualism and evolution in a person. The coop acts like a stage of sorts and the only DVD owned by the group for viewing is an entire season whose title reads The lair of love, a clear mock of love Island. This parallel of the inmates that are required to cohabit in seclusion for the purposes of their own prostitution is obvious but the main idea is not.
It is possible that Shyamalan is attempting a meta reflection on the act of performance through the character of the coop as a criticism of the performativities and the sayings that one reappropriates from the realm of reality television or even how one internalizes their culture as a function of practitioner. However, the skinniness of her pen constrains this to a speculation rather than a full argument.
Encounters are considerably less enjoyable in “The Watchers,” suffers awkwardly from a half-baked script, and mismatched line delivery. It does not as though characters seem lost in their own speech, every character offering a mental note of what watchers are about. Further exposition combination with the dialogue wherein, typically, the character reports his inner sensation with bare exactitude similarly thwart the aspirations of the actors. Fanning copes with the vacancy of Mina very convincingly, her wine cold armor of stoicism & seriousness housing some tragedy, however hames herself in scenes where the need is to be high, to be desperate. For Campbell, who is herself carving a niche within horror(“Barbarian,” “Black Mirror,” “Bird Box”), such eyebrows, such is the fury.
Georgetown, on the other hand, makes no concession regarding background information and keeps typing dialogues or monologues that are considerably wordy and the story is positively bloated. In this tale Shyamalan cannot choose whether to be a fairytale or a horror story. And in this trait lies the potential of the film which unfortunately remains unexplored due to her indecisiveness. Rough ideas and attempts at depth do exist and they are scanty where such a film cannot be outstand her stance. Even “The Watchers”, which provokes some interest but disappoints in the end, shows a Director who tries too hard while still grappling with the spider webs of quaint art.
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