Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 102 minutes
Release Date: June 7th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Warner Bros.
Director(s): Ishana Shyamalan
Writer(s): Ishana Shyamalan / A.M. Shine (novel)

Try not to die.

While The Watchers might be Ishana Night Shyamalan’s feature debut, it isn’t her first directorial effort as so many are quick to describe when speaking on the nepotism at play with its production (father M. Night Shyamalan self-financed the project before selling to Warner Bros.). Will explaining that she cut her teeth on “Servant” help matters considering her dad was an executive producer and more synonymous with the show than creator Tony Basgallop? No. But anyone who watched it will know that Ishana’s involvement wasn’t a handout. The episodes she wrote and directed were often its best. Shifting to movies was inevitable.

The jump arrives via an adaptation of an A.M. Shine novel and the result has all the earmarks of a “Shyamalan film” with the eeriness of The Village and the dark fantasy of Ladt in the Water—the latter of which shouldn’t be surprising considering M. Night wrote it as a bedtime story for his kids. Comparisons are therefore unavoidable since Ishana isn’t only following his footsteps where career is concerned, but also his genre of choice. It shouldn’t make or break its success, however. Every new work of art is compared to similar works that came before it. To simply point to her father is disingenuously reductive.

Because the truth of the matter is that The Watchers isn’t a perfect film. It doesn’t stand apart from its supernatural thriller heritage or from the piece of that heritage that M. Night carved out for himself. It’s also not a bad film. It looks great, delivers effective performances, and sets a moody atmosphere that gets your heart racing as far as the characters’ safety goes. If I must point to one flaw in particular, I’d probably focus on the script considering it holds a lot of intrigue that seems glossed over by the needs of the plot. I wonder if it’s a case where reading the book adds a layer of context that watching the adaptation simply cannot provide.

That’s the danger of moving from television to film. Where forty minutes might be shorter than an hour and forty minutes, those episodes are one piece of a whole. She now must condense 300 pages into two episodes—a tall task to complete when you’re dealing with the breadth of Irish folklore at the back of this monsters vs. man fight. And since the latter is what mainstream audiences demand (a three-act, self-contained story), the room to play with the former shrinks to “color” rather than “purpose.” The task is to make Mina’s (Dakota Fanning) journey whole with the rest sprinkled in to serve that goal.

So, we wonder about this young woman’s plight. Trapped in a mysterious Irish forest without no escape, she finds herself imprisoned in a concrete box with a two-way mirror alongside three strangers (Olwen Fouéré’s Madeline, Oliver Finnegan’s Daniel, and Georgina Campbell’s Ciara). Every day at sunset, they must lock themselves in this structure so as not to be killed by the beasts who crawl out of the ground to view them like a reality tv show. What do these “watchers” want? Can Mina and her inmates figure a way out? Is there more than meets the eye? Will Ishana be able to answer those questions and provide insight?

There are some really cool ideas about doppelgangers and immortality in today’s world of generative AI that I would have loved to delve deeper into (“They would get parts wrong like the proportions of my skull or how many fingers are on my hand.”) I love the mythological implications of fantasy born from reality with evidence beyond the experience of what we are seeing as well as the psychological ramifications of isolation, abuse, and guilt that plays into character motivations. But Shyamalan can’t quite connect the dots between theme and narrative in a way that doesn’t make it all a superficial projection atop the main conceit.

Does that mean The Watchers is a failure? No. It’s the first film of a young filmmaker with a ton of promise. It’s a lesson in finding the balance between the implicit and explicit that even her father sometimes manages to fumble despite a three-decade career that includes some of my favorite movies. Strip everything away and this is a solid if generic thriller that delivers the goods on a purely formal level. Add back some of the flavor and you see where Ishana can go if given the time and room to grow. Hopefully she gets that opportunity via more television shows (without her father’s name attached) to cut her teeth and learn from others as well as more scripts to find her voice. I’m looking forward to it.

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(L-r) OLIVER FINNEGAN as Daniel, OLWEN FOUÉRÉ as Madeline, DAKOTA FANNING as Mina and GEORGINA CAMPBELL as Ciara in New Line Cinema’s and Warner Bros. Pictures’ fantasy thriller THE WATCHERS; courtesy of a Warner Bros. Pictures.