To be a fly on the wall at a Shyamalan family dinner…

If the films of ‘M. Night’ and now daughter Ishana are anything to go by, family conversation must be so strangely articulated, so prone to over-explanation and bizarrely inhuman rhetoric that simply being present might go some way to explaining why the pair render ‘human conversation’ on screen in the way they do.

Adapted from A.M. Shine’s novel of the same name, The Watchers seemed to be touted as a new release from the elder Shyamalan before the theatrical trailer cheekily pulled back the curtain to reveal daughter Ishana at the helm. I don’t want this to read as an outright criticism of nepo-baby privilege, but it’s interesting to see just how much the promotion for the film (as well as the genre/style of the piece) places Ishana’s work as a product of the family brand.

To evaluate the film on its own merits, The Watchers sees Dakota Fanning fall foul of ancient Irish folklore, trapped in a remote woodland setting that seemingly houses supernatural entities referred to as the titular ‘watchers’. Working in a pet shop, Mina is asked to transport a parrot to a local zoo (because that’s how zoos source their animals?) Before she begins the trip we get a sequence showing Mina chat up a guy in a local pub. In this scene Mina puts on a brunette wig and pretends to be someone else. Ah – foreshadowing! Sort of. Like so many elements of the film this is just one loose thread that is left hanging.

After the night out, Mina begins her journey escorting the parrot (an homage to The Birds, maybe?), driving into rural Ireland only for her car to breakdown in a ‘spooky’ forest. Deciding that the best choice of action is to grab the parrot cage and begin hiking aimlessly into the underbrush based on the vague notion that someone must live around here, Mina stumbles across some ‘bad vibes’ in the woods. Saved from unseen forces by an older woman named Madeline, Mina finds refuge in a glass-fronted rectangular structure known as the ‘coop’ (seen extensively in the film’s trailer and posters, that appears to offer Madeline, Ciara and Daniel refuge from the beasts outside.

Cinematographer Eli Arenson offers some unsettling imagery, particularly around sequences for which the camera and crew are made invisible for the benefit of the wall-sized mirror that the occupants of the Coop live with on the inside, but in many ways this was one of the very few aspects of the film I found myself praising.

The Watchers as a whole feels so strangely half-hearted, as if the actors themselves were never sold on the idea pitched to them, that any sense of peril or dread needed for a genre exercise of this type is completely absent. Sure, the horror genre is known for characters making stupid or self-serving decisions, but I’ve rarely seen a film where every character seen on screen is self-contradictory, resolutely stupid, and frustratingly oblivious to the evident dangers around them. Early on in the film when Mina first arrives at the Coop, both herself and the other characters begin rattling off monotone exposition as if the woodland itself somehow filters out emotion or, I don’t know, logical human behaviour? I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the performance direction immediately echoes the elder Shyamalan’s worst cardboard characters in films like Old, The Happening or Knock at the Cabin.

Take this exchange after Mina enters the coop, all of the placeholder lines carefully constructed dialogue performed as if the cast were given sedatives prior to the take:

Daniel: Who is she? Where did she come from?
Ciara: Poor bird. Who would bring a bird into a place like this?
Madeline: Mind your manners, both of you.
Mina: What is happening, what is this place?
Madeline: We call it the coop.
Mina: Who are you?
Madeline: My name is Madeline. The girl is Ciara and the boy is Daniel. We’re just like you – and you?
Mina: What?
Madline: Who are you?
Mina: Mina
Madeline: Pleasure to meet you, Mina…

Later on when sharing the ‘Rules’ of the coop – don’t worry, they’re not important, at least two of the rules have already been broken by the apparently ‘knowledgeable’ characters before they’re even set out – Madeline, Ciara and Daniel chime them off in unison in what I assume was meant to be a chilling moment, but one that instead produces unintended comedy.

As the ‘mystery’ of The Watchers unfolds we’re left asking how any of this makes any sense at all, even by the logic of the world that Shine/Shyamalan has crafted. How much of the narrative’s inconsistencies and plot holes are a product of Shine’s original novel or Shyamalan’s script is difficult to decipher without knowing the source text, but the film provides very little incentive pick the book up to find out.

[Spoiler warning]

Some questions:

1. Why does Mina keep the bird?
2. When someone suspiciously identifying as ‘John’ is knocking on the door, why would Daniel even suggest that ‘Even if it’s not John, if there’s someone out there we should help them.’
3. If the watchers need to observe humans to emulate them, how did one become ‘Madeline’ if she was already dead before the ‘Professor’ journeyed to the woods?
4. Why does Mina keep the bird?
5. Why on earth would Mina, Madeline and Ciara agree to simply go on with their lives having apparently escaped escaped a worldview shattering, life-altering traumatic experience? Should they not, I don’t know, call the police? Have them lockdown the woodland in some way? Maybe inform someone that this might be the reason that literally dozens if not hundreds of people have mysteriously disappeared?
6. Did Ciara not love her husband at all? She apparently just goes back to her life without any apparent grief or desire to find out what happened.
7. In order to build his bunker, the professor claims to have hired thirteen local men a day. Even if, as he claims, these were men without families, how do thirteen men a day go missing for months on end and it not be a concern? Also, is he running some sort of psycho-induction event each morning? “Here’s this bunker that I want you to build. Yesterday’s men left off with the roof needing more work… what do you mean where are yesterday’s men?”
8. Why the fuck does Mina keep the bird?