The Watchers (Ishana Night Shyamalan, 2024)

If it’s 2024, it must be the Summer of Shyamalan! First up, there is the release of the Watchers, the debut feature from writer and director Ishana Night. 

Then in August it’s up to father M. Night to set a Trap for moviegoers with his new thriller, which not only stars Josh Hartnett, but also another Shyamalan daughter, Saleka, as pop star Lady Raven.

Trap will probably be a hit, as it boasts a killer hook. To wit: Hartnett plays a wanted man who attends Lady Raven’s concert with his teen daughter, only to realize the police has set a trap for him. Can he get out? Do we even want him to? So many questions right of the bat!

With a hook like that, Trap could be M. Night’s biggest hit in years, so that’s something to look forward to.

But not everything is coming up roses for the Shyamalans at the moment and to get back to The Watchers: I caught a screening on Monday, after it opened (and flopped) over the weekend in the US, getting some truly terrible reviews in the process.

Going in with suitably lowered expectations I thought the movie wasn’t that bad. Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut feature treads a fine line between psychological drama and and Irish-set folk horror, but it’s intriguing enough to warrant a watch, if you can forgive some clunky dialogue and characters frantically explaining the plot to each other in the last ten minutes.

Dakota Fanning plays Mina, an American artist living in Galway, who works in a pet shop and is told by her boss to drive to Belfast to deliver a rare golden parrot to a buyer. 

When her car breaks down in the middle of f*cking nowhere, Mina gets stranded in a rather large forest, where she finds shelter in a concrete bunker. 

That also means she is trapped together with a band of strangers, who seem to be led by an older woman, Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), and also include the younger Danny (Oliver Finnegan) and Ciara (Georgina Campbell).

The room has a wall of glass, and an electric light that activates at nightfall, when mysterious creatures (dubbed the Watchers by Danny) come above ground to observe their human captives.

It’s an intriguing set-up, and combined with a lot of eery atmospherics and some wacky philosophies on the essence of human nature (and assorted fairy folk) it was more or less enough to lure me in.

However, The Watchers is the kind of mystery that practically begs the question why all this is happening and eventually absolutely everything is explained in great detail.

With the benefit of hindsight, I just wish the movie had stopped at the ninety minute mark and left the core mystery intact.

However…

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