ESCAPING THE SHADOWS: THE MISSED POTENTIAL OF 'THE WATCHERS'

If there ever was a film with all the tools for a great folk horror drama, The Watchers is it – yet it manages to be little more than a bit of a whimper among the grand canyon of this genre. By analysing the film’s mishaps, I hope to prove how it could have broken free from its own shadows of failure.

ESCAPING EXPECTATIONS: INTRODUCTION TO 'THE WATCHERS'

The Watchers, a horror film by Ishana Night Shyamalan, peeks enticingly out of the thick creepy-fog towards which it has been trailing, but only to dart back into the undergrowth, its early promises going unfulfilled. As an atmospheric jump-scare of a movie, it certainly had me at ‘Hello’, with its insistent dark tension and haunting mysteries. Then, all too soon, it veers off the scarily unpredictable path I thought it was on, going incautiously where so many other movies have gone before: all narrative meandering, no running lost.

THE ESCAPE BEGINS: A PROMISING START

The film’s cold open, which opens with an incredible longtake by Eli Arenson, is pure gothic perfection that, even in the cold light of day, could still send a shiver down the spine of a horror fanatic. Unfortunately, this promising beginning, with all the payoffs of a great horror film, makes way for a film that is notably lacking in the kind of tension and intrigue one would expect from a work that begins so strongly.

ESCAPING DEPTH: CHARACTERIZATION AND PLOT

With the main characters of ‘The Watchers’ led by a Snow White-like Mina (played by Dakota Fanning, who could have been fascinating if we’d known more about her than we do, since her backstory is as foggy as the film’s atmosphere) they’re surrounded by a disinterested cast of characters each with their own potential storylines that the movie altogether fails to unpack in a way that leads to anything interesting. ‘The Watchers’ veers less towards an intriguing knit of threads than a series of knots and tangles.

THE ELUSIVE ESCAPE: BUILDING TENSION AND ATMOSPHERE

And for a story to succeed at this kind of work – especially for a story that’s told against the backdrop of horror – is one of the fundamental tasks of good writing: to create an atmosphere of suspense and fear. In this regard, ‘The Watchers’ spends brief moments doing just that, through its visuals and its opening scenes, and then it fails, falling victim to needless expository dialogue that quickly kills off any chance the story might have had at keeping the reader on the bleeding edge of a good old-fashioned creep-out.

ESCAPING REALITY: THE WORLD WITHIN 'THE WATCHERS'

The almost theatrical nature of the setting for ‘The Watchings’ – an art-nouveau prison – a modernist building that’s ‘half-way between the city and the forest’ that insulates its inhabitants from the outside world – is a setting ripe for tight, claustrophobic drama. The Guardian uses the rise of the internet to offer an interesting speculation about ‘The Watchings’: what would a story about ‘sometimes friendly, sometimes benevolent, sometimes sinister human-like beings’ look like in a film set in an internet cafe? In any event, The Guardian doesn’t push its own metaphor far enough – it doesn’t quite exploit its setting, or make the most of the rich material it presents us with – of the human condition, people under pressure. The film only makes it halfway. At the end, the guard goes in and sits down on the bench beside him.

ESCAPING THE CAGE: UNFULFILLED POTENTIAL

Like the figures within it, trying to escape their physical and metaphorical cages, The Watchers keeps trying to remove itself from the horror generic mode to buttonholings on identity, on the politics of freedom and surveillance, but, like those escapist efforts in the narrative, this effort towards something more original is also abortive, never complete, never fully worked through.

ESCAPING INTO THE NIGHT: CONCLUSORY THOUGHTS

The Watchers is a lesson in how storytelling is such a treacherous proposition in that it is all too easy for a narrative to become mired in its own apparent profundities and to be stalemated by its own world-build, long before it has fully achieved a satisfying payoff. The film is unquestionably impressively shot, and it has the seeds of an engrossing narrative in its setup. Though much of its early passages are confusing, they are also richly evocative, and it is entirely possible to linger in that state of strange confusion, lost in dark woods to whatever metaphor may accompany one in that state. But it goes the way of so many other promising films that promise much – and little – in the end.

THE ESSENCE OF ESCAPE

At a fundamental level, escape captures the very essence of narrative energy – the drive to break free, to transcend one’s present state, the call to leave behind the familiar and venture into the untamed with a healthy dose of fear and a shot of adrenalin. In The Watchers, the theme of escape, literal and metaphoric, is toyed with, before ultimately evoking the sensation fleetingly. What’s striking, however, is the inability of the film to escape its own narrative and thematic box, which points to a bigger failure of imagination.

Escape might be a useful lodestar for writers – not just of horror and suspense, of course, but those who wish to surprise us unexpectedly – and not only for characters within their stories, but the storytellers themselves, who need to keep us busy guessing and follow the never-ending tide of expectation writ large.