Director/Screenplay – Ishana Night Shyamalan, Based on the Novel The Watchers (2021) by A.M. Shine, Producers – Nimitt Mankad, Ashwin Rajan & M. Night Shyamalan, Photography – Eli Arenson, Music – Abel Korzeniowski, Visual Effects – Cadence Effects (Supervisor – Craig Crawford), Cantina Creative (Supervisor – Stephen Lawes), FuseFX (Supervisor – Tommy Tran), Ingenuity Studios (Supervisor – Gabriel Regentin), Mathematic Film (Supervisors – Fred Brandon & Mathieu Malard) & Vitality Visual Effects (Supervisor – Jiwoong Kim), Special Effects Supervisor – Paul Byrne, Prosthetics – Matt Smith, Production Design – Ferdia Murphy. Production Company – Blinding Edge Pictures/Inimitable Pictures.
Cast
Dakota Fanning (Mina/Lucy), Olwen Fouere (Madeline), Georgina Campbell (Ciara), Oliver Finnegan (Daniel), John Lynch (Professor Rory Kilmartin), Alistair Brammer (John)
Plot
Mina, an American living in Galway, Ireland, is asked by the owner of the pet store where she works to deliver a parrot to a customer in Belfast. Mina sets out but her car breaks down as she passes through a forest. She wanders looking for help and comes across Madeline who urges her to get to shelter in a building they call The Coop before nightfall. There she is required to join Madeline and the two others, Ciara and Daniel, as they stand or go about normal life in front of the large plate glass window as watched by mysterious unseen creatures outside. Mina finds that she cannot leave the forest and must stay in The Coop being watched each night. As Mina determines to find out who The Watchers are and make an escape, she is warned that this will earn their wrath.
The Watchers was the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of M. Night Shyamalan, a regular genre director with works such as The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002), The Village (2004) and Split (2017), among others. Ishana had previously worked as an assistant director on her father’s film Old (2021) and as a producer on his tv series Servant (2019-23), where she directed six of its episodes.
A couple of years ago there were various articles about the ‘nepo baby’ phenomenon – pointing out how children of celebrities seem to have a head start over the average person in launching their careers in terms of connections and names to call on. Examples were pointed to such as Lily-Rose Depp, Colin Hanks, Dakota Johnson, Jack Quaid, Margaret Qualley and Meryl Streep’s daughters. The point I would make is that people tend to make the dismissive assumption that most of these are the untalented getting by on their parents’ name alone – say no more than Jaden Smith or Stephen King’s son Owen – while not crediting that some of the cited names have established themselves as fine talents in their own right – Bryce Dallas Howard, Sofia Coppola or Alexander Skarsgård.
Ishana gets her film directing career launched here after only a handful of tv episodes. (I would like to see someone without having a pedigree name to call on achieve that). There are various debates going around as to how much that influence was to accusations that M. Night was there looking over Ishana’s shoulder throughout the entire shoot. You suspect that Ishana should have been better off like Stephen King’s other son Joe Hill in adopting a name that was anything other than Shyamalan and not accepting her father’s presence as a producer in order to seriously prove herself. She does after all take the name Night Shyamalan, ‘Night’ being a an Anglicised nickname that Shyamalan has taken – it would be kind of like the a child of Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe or Billy Bob Thornton naming themselves John Buster Crabbe or Mary Bob Thornton. You get the impression that Shyamalan is oblivious or indifferent to the whole nepo bay thing. Rather than take any criticism from it, he goes so far to wind his other daughter Saleka, an R&B singer, in as a performer in part the plot of his subsequent film Trap (2024).
Dakota Fanning lost in the woods
You get the feeling that much of the diffidence about The Watchers was people bringing out their general antipathy to the Shyamalan name – of which I am not one of the naysayers – and/or the whole nepo baby thing. It is in cases like this that you wish sometimes that films were released with no names on the credits so that people could just view them in terms of what was on offer rather than reading a whole series of likes and dislikes in based on the parties involved.
I admit to a certain scepticism about The Watchers – largely about a film handled by an inexperienced director. The surprise about this is that not long after The Watchers starts, Ishana puts all of that to silence and delivers a really good film. It takes a while to get there. The first fifteen or so minutes takes us through Dakota Fanning’s life in Galway and her journey into the countryside. It is nice to see Dakota, who was a phenomenally talented child actor a few years ago but has since been overshadowed by her sister Elle, back on screens, while the Irish countryside is very prettily photographed.
The point that The Watchers steps over into the genuinely uncanny comes with Dakota Fanning’s arrival at The Coop and the incredibly weird scene where she is told to get inside before nightfall and then she and the others are urged to stand in front of the big plate glass mirror window. The WTF surprise is then when there comes applause from outside and she is told that the Watchers are pleased to see her, all before the camera pulls back to an exterior of The Coop and keeps going until it is a small square of light surrounded by night forest.
(l to r) Georgina Campbell, Dakota Fanning, Oliver Finnegan and Olwen Fouere in front of the window in The Coop being watched
Ishana gets a really good grip on this sense of the uncanniness. The forest is alive with half-seen shapes of things maybe seen flitting in the background, and of not knowing whether to trust the rest of the group. Above all there is the sense of mystery about what is going on. It is the fascinating example of a conceptual horror film where we are thrown into a world that operates according to very different rules to the one we are familiar with where the story becomes about the protagonist’s gradual Conceptual Breakthrough to understanding of the world around them.
I made immediate comparisons to M. Night’s The Village and its community at siege from mysterious creatures who are given a series of rules to live by. Although perhaps more than anything, what The Watchers resembles is the recent strange and uncanny tv series From (2022- ) wherein a group of people are trapped in a mysterious town where they must shelter at night from shapechanging creatures that can adopt human form and where there exist a similar series of rules to protect them. The film here does provide answers, which are far-fetched but by no means the damp squib that M. Night’s The Village delivered.
Which does bring us to the whole question that hangs over The Watchers – that of how much is it an M. Night film. I want to argue that it is a strong enough film that it can stand on its own without the need to see it with the M. Night name or not. However, people are going to invariably make the comparison. Certainly, The Watchers resembles one of the films that Shyamalan was making in the early 2000s – in particular The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village and to a lesser extent films like Lady in the Water (2006) and The Happening (2008) – where we are thrown into the midst of something intensely anomalous and weird and follow the protagonist’s coming into understanding of the nature of the world and/or their place in it. The difference I would argue is that The Watchers arrives at an ending that works far better than most of these others and that Ishana does the whole left field surprise pull the carpet out from under us with better effect than many of her father’s films.
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2024 list. Nominee for Best Director (Ishana Night Shyamalan) and Best Adapted Screenplay at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
