If you’re an American and are desperately running from your past, where should you go?  To a pet shop in Galway, Ireland, of course.  Given how essential this detail is to the entire story of The Watchers, you would think it would be addressed at some point, but no.  For a movie that is ultimately about the importance of getting the details right, The Watchers rarely bothers to do so.  While it does stop at regular intervals to deliver unwieldy gobs of exposition that explain what is happening, it never concerns itself with why.  It’s a story that insists on giving a perfectly logical explanation for everything, but doesn’t make any logical sense.

Back to the shop in Galway, Ireland.  This is where the movie introduces us to our heroine, Mina, played by the very American Dakota Fanning.  Seeing her sit among cages of animals for sale, I couldn’t help but wonder, “What is she doing there of all places?”  Is there a reason why she ended up there instead of, I dunno, the PetSmart in Papillion, Nebraska?  Later, when she listened to a voicemail message from her sister in the States and didn’t call her back, I understood that she wanted to put distance between herself and her past/family/regrets/etc.  However, I remained curious about how she decided on Galway, Ireland as her refuge.  I’m sure Galway is a great place to live, but why is it important to this character and this story?  No answers were provided.

What Mina is avoiding isn’t revealed until the very end, although the movie alludes to it so many times along the way you’ll know what’s coming long before the movie finally decides to Go There.  Until then, Mina is content to put on a wig, hang out at a local pub and pass herself off as a ballerina (another inexplicable detail.)  Smarter movies have done something interesting with this premise, but The Watchers is content to use it as a sign that Mina is a troubled soul who wants to be someone else, even for just one night.  The next day, her boss gives her a ridiculous delivery assignment that proves to be incredibly consequential.  Based on what happens afterwards, it’s unfortunate she didn’t call in sick.

Why a pet store would have one of its employees drive a golden parakeet across the country to its new owner initially didn’t make sense to me.  However, the internet tells me that these birds cost several thousand dollars.  Even still, why wouldn’t the owner deliver something that expensive himself?  Regardless, bird delivery certainly is a unique MacGuffin.  Based on how the movie began, we know that Mina will become trapped in the Enchanted Forest she’s driving through.  Sure enough, her car conks out smack-dab in the middle of it.  After sitting glumly in the growing darkness, Mina decides to look for the house she saw before she broke down.  She spies a gray-haired lady lurking about the ancient trees and calls out to her, with no response.  Then as shadowy creatures make their presence known, the gray-haired lady rushes Mina into a cabin for safety.  But it’s no ordinary cabin.  One wall consists of a one-way mirror, which allows beings named “the watchers” to observe the occupants from the other side.  More on them in a minute.

The gray-haired lady, who calls herself Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), is not alone.  Inside are two others, Ciara (Georgina Campbell), Daniel (Oliver Finnegan).  Like Madeline, they’ve all been trapped in the forest for months.  (I think one said eight months and another five.)  Despite repeated attempts, they’ve been unable to escape the forest due to its disorienting nature.  Every night they must return to “The Coop” (as they have nicknamed it) by nightfall and put themselves on display for The Watchers, or Bad Things Will Happen.  Ciara’s husband John left one night and never returned, and they’ve resigned themselves to putting on a show ever since.  As for The Watchers, who (or what) they are is kept a mystery because the story refuses to tell us.  Until then, we only catch brief glimpses of unconvincing CGI and hear their shrieks on the soundtrack.  

Madeline presents herself as the leader of the group of inmates, and tells Mina about The Watchers and The Rules with the manner of a dry, college professor.  She’s brainwashed Ciara and Daniel so thoroughly that they can recite them on cue.  Mina, a typically rebellious American, doesn’t want anything to do with this nonsense and refuses to play along and passes the time watching videotapes of a Big Brother-ish show.  Why is this show the only thing in The Coop to watch?  No explanation provided.

Like a real-life Katniss Everdeen, Mina is intent not only on surviving but finding a way out of the game.  She goes down into a deep hole where a Watcher lives and retrieves a bicycle, but this pisses off The Watchers and Madeline promptly returns it.  Then, after an ill-advised attempt to Daniel to “change things”, Madeline offers up information she could have shared months prior but simply chose not to.  After her exposition dump, the group notices a door that was in the floor all along that leads to an immense underground lair, which has all of the comforts of home, including real food.  While The Watchers trash the upstairs, Mina finds a series of videos (300!) on an old Mac featuring the builder of The Coop that both explains and doesn’t explain what he was up to.  Then, after a daring escape, Mina unearths more information that leads to another reveal, which in turn forces Mina to face a traumatic event from her childhood.  If this all sounds exhausting, trust me, it is.

While watching The Watchers reveal more and more layers of goofiness, I was reminded of Things Heard and Seen.  That movie, which was far from perfect, somehow became something totally bonkers yet brilliant in the end (YMMV).  Unfortunately, The Watchers doesn’t have that movie’s willingness to pull out all the stops and just go nuts.  Which is unfortunate, because if it did it would have been a lot more fun.  Instead, the movie is a slow, mostly joyless slog until it finally gives us The Fantastical Answer That Explains Everything (also known as the Shyamalan Maneuver).  The big reveal, as it were, winds up being the equivalent of a wet firecracker and the movie ends with a pitifully sad “pop”.

What ultimately sinks The Watchers isn’t lack of ambition, because the story it (eventually) tells spans centuries.  However, it fails to combine its constructs into a captivating or even interesting story.  The plot is a mashup of familiar influences that fail to coalesce, no matter how much Ishana Shyamalan tries to glue them together.  The story is a three-legged stool: one leg ancient Celtic lore, another leg provides a young adult fantasy adventure structure, with the third being an M. Night Shyamalan favorite, the supernatural as a trauma healer.  If this movie simply had focused on doing any one of these elements convincingly, it could have worked well enough.  As it stands, none of them ultimately work and the result is a wobbly stool that falls over with the slightest touch.

The Watchers does have a few bright spots to speak of.  I liked the concept of The Coop and how it’s a twist on a cage in a zoo.  The movie is impressively dark and moody thanks to the cinematography of Eli Arenson.  Dakota Fanning does well in portraying Mina as an irritable gloomster who shakes off her doldrums and takes charge of the situation.  My only problem with her performance is how it never meshes with the overall aesthetic of the story.   The Watchers is a movie with silly, fantastical underpinnings that refuses to treat them accordingly.  It’s a wet blanket of a movie that refuses to be fun.  Not Recommended.

Analysis

I stated above that The Watchers fails because it never makes logical sense despite going to great lengths to explain itself.  To be fair, the movie does an adequate job tying all of its Celtic lore elements together by the end.  The fairies are changelings who were duped by humanity long ago.  The Coop was built by the professor so that he could study the fairies.  He came up with the idea of having one of them take the place of his dead wife, but felt bad about this and took his own life.  With the professor gone, the fairies used The Coop to study humans so that they could effectively mimic them and eventually join human society.  Madeline was the fairy the professor captured, and his betrayal drove her to find a way to escape the forest.  Her odd mannerisms and speech patterns are due to the fact that she hasn’t mastered human behavior.  Of the three legs of the stool that comprised the narrative, this is the only one that adds up and works.  The other two don’t come together for a variety of reasons.

First is the movie’s strange choice of adopting the structure of a young adult fantasy adventure   reminiscent of The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent, etc.  As such, the story is one where our (youngish) heroine is thrust into a Strange New World, must learn The Rules of The Game, survive Lethal Challenges and ultimately find The Way Out.  This aspect of the movie doesn’t work because the rules of its world are not airtight.

For example, in order for The Hunger Games to work, it must make sense within the context of the world it establishes.  It has to offer plausible explanations for how Panem is divided into the capital and thirteen districts, how order is enforced, why the capital is as outlandish as it is, why the hunger games exist, etc.  The story only works if the details of the world in which it takes place add up.  The world of Panem is basically a large equation composed of umpteen variables.  If any of those variables is handled sloppily, we begin to ask questions and the story becomes incredible.  Think of the story as a sweater.  If our minds spot a loose thread, we consciously pull on it until the sweater begins to unravel.  This is how I felt watching The Watchers.  There were so many loose threads that I couldn’t resist pulling on them.

How did Madeline, Ciara and David survive for months on a diet of water and captured birds?  How did they cook the birds?  Why are they not skin and bones by the time Mina wanders into their midst?  Then there’s the question of hygiene.  Why does Daniel still have short hair and no facial hair?  Wouldn’t they smell horribly after living for months in the same clothes and no showers?  The items within The Coop itself also left me puzzled.  Why was there an old phonograph?  Why a VCR with only the Big Brother show to watch?  I assumed that Madeline lifted the rug so that the others would find it when the rest of the fairies grew restless, but why did nobody notice it months earlier?

The other leg of the story involves Mina and the childhood tragedy that haunts her.  Evidently, this has led her to a pet store in Galway, England.  Aside from my fixation on that peculiar detail, the movie is basically a shaggy dog story where Mina sees how failing to face that tragedy has turned her into a changeling like Madeline and the other fairies.  By refusing to deal with what traumatizing event, she’s become an unrecognizable monster, both to herself and her twin sister.  Hmm.  The notion that we can get past our personal traumas with a little help from the supernatural is one that made M. Night Shyamalan famous (The Sixth Sense, Signs).  In The Watchers, however, this notion is delivered in an incredibly ham-fisted way.

Flashbacks tell us that Mina believes she’s at fault for her mother’s death because her behavior distracted her mother and caused the crash that killed her.  There may be some truth to that, but why her mom insisted on closing the window while the car was moving, let alone before ensuring that her daughter’s hands were clear of it before she tried closing, made no sense to me.  I don’t want to call Mina’s mom the worst mother in the world or anything, but her actions at that moment were very questionable, to say the least.

The movie also lessens the impact of Mina’s psychological breakthrough in how it alludes to that tragedy.  When Mina is running through the woods, she somehow sees her sister in the trees.  At times, this approach led me to think that the entire movie was going to devolve into a “just a dream” narrative, or reveal that everything we were seeing was the result of Mina being under hypnosis.  Thankfully the movie didn’t go in either direction.  Unfortunately, when it eventually uses the Celtic folklore to force Mina to realize what she’s become, it feels forced and completely unearned because of how the movie has ignored that element of the plot for vast stretches.

Afterward

I typically avoid reading other reviews before mine is complete.  This self-imposed rule helps ensure that what I write hasn’t been influenced by other critics, especially those who I respect.  So when I saw mentions on X of Richard Newberry’s article on The Watchers in The Hollywood Reporter, I ignored it until I was done.  With my review of the movie now complete, I read it and was impressed as usual by Richard’s thoughtful analysis.  I was also surprised at how much he  gleaned from the movie that I failed to notice.  (Read it here.)

His lead states that The Watchers “has divided critics”, which is charitable given that the movie currently has a 34% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.  When I drill down into the Top Critics score, it’s even lower at 24% (9/37).  So only a quarter of established critics consider it “worth watching”.  Since I don’t want what I say here to be seen as a refutation of Richard’s analysis, I’ll move along.

Richard then describes how he sees parallels between the character of Mina and Ishana Night Shyamalan’s struggles to become an artist in her own right.  He also conjectures that the movie is a commentary of her observing her father’s life as an artist in the public spotlight.  Both of these takes seem reasonable to me, because artists are typically drawn to material that resonates with them on a personal level.  As the daughter of a father with considerable pull in The Biz, she was able to select something that she saw herself in and not, say Halloween 10 for her directorial debut.  That she adapted the material to include allusions to herself and her father is not in and of itself surprising.  The movie doesn’t live or die based on metatextual references, though.

What surprised me was how specific things that I did notice while watching the movie that failed to register.  For example, Richard points out the movie’s references to environmental concerns, how the plight of the changeling fairies has undercurrents of “colonialism, miscegenation and appropriation.”  He also mentions how the revelation of Madeline as a changeling adds a layer of “cultural theft, fear, and greed under the guise of academia.”  Again, these are well reasoned points drawn from the narrative text.  The question I had was, why didn’t I notice them?  I’m an active movie watcher, and while I heard Madeline’s recount of the fate of the changelings, the larger significance of this information was lost on me.

As I pondered Richard’s analysis, I realized that my issues with the movie’s execution are what prevented me from recognizing what Shyamalan was trying to convey.  The construction of the narrative is clunky, and critical information is conveyed through a series of awkward monologues that stop the movie dead in its tracks every time.  Where the movie should be aiming for a subtler approach, the movie instead amplifies things with a bombastic score and terrible CGI monsters.  The performances within the movie are fine, but with the notable exception of Madeline, the characters actions are mostly inexplicable.  While the incongruity of having Fanning in the leading role makes more sense with added context, the basis of her character is still wanting.  As Richard points out, Shyamalan clearly intended for her movie to be much more than a typical horror movie.  Unfortunately, the way she tells the story negates much of what she’s after.  The nuances of her story are drowned out by huge formalistic problems that most people, like myself, simply couldn’t get past.